Topolobampo to Zihuatanejo (part 1)

(Pronounced: Zee-what-ah-nay-oh)

Wed 22nd March 2023
We are now in Zihuatanejo and will remain here until Kathy flies back to the UK in 2 weeks and I will move the boat to somewhere safe where I can haul it out before I return to the UK for the hurricane season.

I will expand on the trip below, but basically we have traveled through various levels of paradise, ending up at anchor in Zihuat which is definitely in the running for one of my favorite towns ever. As we left the very dry desert vistas of the Baja and traveled south, the land got greener and greener, with that comes more humidity, and also more bitey things. Along the way the waters filled up with more and more interesting creatures, now we have to watch out for Crocodiles in the water and it is not recommended to dive on your hull in the Ixtapa marina because of these guys. While it is in the mid 20’s (77 f) in La Paz now, we are often in the high 30’s (100 f) here.

The boat has performed really well, but it wants some attention. The last time we were in a marina or tied to a dock was a few months ago and the topsides could do with a good washdown. An oil change is due, and the hull needs some antifoul. We are low on fresh water. These warm waters cause the hull to foul very quickly, i.e., in a few days a clean hull will be covered in a light growth, after a week it’s really bad. I have been paying local divers to clean the boat at various stops along the way, but the antifoul is now missing in a few areas.

Starlink.
This is our first voyage with Starlink for our internet access and I had decided to only connect it for an hour at most each day to get the weather and check emails. It’s quite heavy on the batteries. Guess what, we need bigger batteries. We have spent many an evening now watching the BBC, comedy and documentaries. we use it on passage, when the sun is shining or the engine is running and read tweets instead of looking out for fishing nets or whales. I hate the often used phrase ‘game changer’ but it really is for long distance cruising. I no longer need to worry after a few days out of cell phone range if the weather is turning bad, I can contact people ahead, marinas etc from remote anchorages, and I easily provide some customer support for my old work while in very remote areas. I had a great 30 minute video chat with a friend back in Liverpool on Skype when making 6 knots in rolly seas a few dozen miles offshore. Nice one Elon, you’re great with cars and rockets, why not just stick with them eh?

The trip south
I have left it a bit late to document our trip, we did hope to make it to Acapulco, but decided to take in as many places as we could heading south, and even being lazy about it, it still seems like a roller coaster of a trip. We had lots of amazing experiences along the way, but I will just mention a few with pictures below.

6th Jan – Los Mochis
From Topolobampo we took the local mini bus service to Los Mochis and met up with Arturo who lives there. A clown joined us for a few stops and visited everyone on board looking for a financial contribution to his somewhat complicated personal & social condition. While passing the hat around he was jabbering on in some crazy deranged squeaky clowns voice. Given that just yesterday cartel gunman had been controlling these roads and stopping vehicles, he wasn’t the most calming of entertainers, especially if you’re like Kathy who has seen far too many scary clown thrillers.

Los Mochis is a big city, and we wandered around the main park before our bus was ready to leave and take us to El Fuerte.

El Fuerte
Arturo joined us on the next bus route to El fuerte, where he spends a lot of time with his girlfriend and her family. We found out later that one of the Cartel members also shared the journey with us. He kind of stood out, but everyone ignored him.

We stayed in a posh hotel, very old and grand, but not at all expensive. El Fuerte is a small town out in the country on the banks of the river Fuerte (Strong river). It has thrived on the lush agriculture and mining in the area. we are close to the copper canyon railway here.

Arturo took us to a local refuge for animals where we enjoyed feeding them. Unfortunately Kathy ignored Arturo’s very strong warning about ‘deeting up’ (The application of insect repellent containing DEET) and she really suffered for that.

This hotel claims to be the birthplace of El Zorro, and each night he does a performance in the restaurant, fortunately we were able to be in and out before he had cloaked up.

After a couple of days we headed back to Las Mochis, took advantage of the Walmart there, then took the next boat back to the boat, bought a dozen Garrafones (20ltr bottles) of water and headed back out to sea.

16th Jan – Altata
We had a great sail south from Topolobampo to Altata, in a previous post I describe how I did this journey on my own and couldn’t find the entrance to the lagoon at Altata, huge breaking surf seemed to cover every possible way in. Since then a few people have told me it’s really easy so armed with more confidence, we had another go. This time it worked out well, however when the channel seems very narrow and it’s dropping from 20 meters deep to 4 meters in just a few boat lengths, it can get quite scary. I saw two fishing boat that looked like they were heading in so I decided to follow them, bad move. They were going to fish off the side of a big bank. A quick course correction and we made it back into the chanel and into the lagoon.

The most striking thing for me was seeing the fishing boats in the bay/lagoon. They fly a sail, a bit like a spinnaker from a rig that has a mast and two poles one extending out over the stern and the other over the bow, making the three corners for attaching the sail. it then fills and just skims the surface of the water. I think their net is dragged over the other side of the boat and they slowly drift the length of the lagoon, several miles at a fairly slow pace. I expect this is a very traditional setup, however I don’t suppose in the old days when they reached the end of the lagoon they would fire up their 250hp outboard motor and scoot back to the start upwind. Still the 40-60 boats make quite an amazing spectacle.

20th Jan – Mazatlan (Old port)
We stayed a few nights in Altata before heading off to Mazatlan. This would be another overnighter and Kathy and I prepared for our 4 hour on / off watch system. Unfortunately we had to motor at the start and as soon as we cleared the sand banks a dense fog descended on us, with very poor visibility and a night passage to handle, we fired up the Radar, praying it would work, it hasn’t been used for years. It did work, but I needed to get Kathy up to speed on how to use it. Along with the AIS we hoped to be ok. It was in the middle of the night when a target I had been tracking seemed to be deliberately aiming for us. These waters are full of very large (200ft ish) Shrimp and Tuna boats, some of them have helicopter pads on them for quick crew changes. Fishermen can be quite worrying with their seemingly random courses, I often wonder if boredom causes them to come and look at the little sailboat from England sending out its AIS beacon. This one was starting to freak me a bit, I turned off the autohelm so I could steer and take avoiding action if it got any closer. The radar had it as being under 0.1 mile from us, I could hear its engine, but no visible contact as the fog was very dense now. The next thing it appears out of the fog, I could see the crew on the deck, lit by the huge working lights that created big globes of light in the fog. I had been sounding a fog horn, but I doubt they would hear that with all their engine noise. They changed course quickly and I presumed they hadn’t expected me to be there. I checked my AIS setup and realised we were not transmitting our signal, just receiving theirs. This is a power saving option I sometimes turn on. Oops. Being a plastic boat, we don’t always make a great radar target so it’s possible they didn’t know we were there.
Come the morning the wind picked up, the fog lifted and the autopilot failed. Fortunately we could put the sails up, the wind steering went on and we happily sailed all the way to Mazatlan. We spotted several whales on this passage.

We anchored in the old port, we are reluctant to use the marinas in the northern part of town, especially as we hit bottom trying to get in last time and I thought we might lose the boat after the surf lifted us up and slammed us back down on the sea bed. The old harbour is also easy to walk downtown from and we had a few chores to do. On our first provisioning trip we found ourselves in the middle of what looked like a carnival parade, but we learnt later it was the parade to chose the Carnival Queen.

So I had to fix the autopilot, there was no way we would get to Acapulco hand steering. I had a plan B, using a tiller pilot, but that was complicated, however I should try to fix that up anyway. My guess was that the remote rudder indicator was not working, it looked ok and we usually get a ERROR 67, which means the remote sensor isn’t working, this has been an issue since we bought the boat and the error never stopped it working. So out came the sensor, it was a sealed unit but on measuring the resistance I guessed the unit was faulty, I pulled the wires apart and they broke apart in the process making me expect that was the problem.

I was only left with about 1 cm of wire sticking out of the unit after I had stripped back the faulty connections, so had to be very careful attaching new wires, I managed it and added a splint to the connections to hopefully give it some ongoing support. It all went back together and we upped anchor and did a waltz around the anchorage, testing it. Thankfully it worked. Also since then we haven’t seen the ERROR 67, which had been popping up every hour or two for the last 8 years now. I presume this connection was always flakey. Looking at the tracks on the chartplotter makes me think the course is even straighter than ever, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.

We got some laundry done, stocked up on food from the mega superstores and the Mercado Municipal, Mazatlan has the best smoked tuna I have ever tasted, and we headed back out to sea and south towards La Cruz.

30th Jan – Isla Isabela
It was an overnighter to Isla Isabela. This island is very special, it has a huge colony of Blue footed boobies, frigate birds and no end of Iguanas. It’s a national park and also has nowhere to anchor easily. The small partially protected bay is mostly rock and many people have had to leave their anchor there as it gets caught under the rocks. This is one of my worst nightmares, we have a very expensive anchor, it’s brilliant, and I don’t want to lose it. Fortunately I had been given the GPS coordinates for a small patch of sand amongst the rocks, it wasn’t much bigger than the size of the boat so we crept in with Kathy and I hanging over the side staring into the water to see if we could find it. We couldn’t, so I launched the dinghy with my snorkel mask and a length of rope and a small buoy. I took my dumbell as an anchor. (It needed using). I put the mask on and hung over the side of the dinghy scooting around until I found the patch. I tied the rope to the dumbell and the buoy to the other end and threw it over, this was in about 30 ft of water. I headed back to Captain Kathy who was motoring around the small bay waiting and we headed back to my mark and dropped the anchor. Next I snorkeled over to the anchor to see it had in fact set in the sand, but right next to a big rock that was also there. Not great, but I hoped the anchor would not drag under the rock, it was fairly calm weather so ‘fingers crossed’.

1st Feb – San Blas
Many people had said to avoid San Blas as it has a bad reputation for noseeums (invisible mossies) that leave bad bites, however it sounded interesting so we headed there and up the river to anchor. It had a pleasant town square and a very laid back feel to it. We had hoped to maybe get a place in the state run marina, but as is often the case, due to very low fees, it was full.

We stayed one night then pushed onto to Mantanchen bay.

2nd Feb – Matanchen Bay
Matanchen Bay was getting a lot of flack on the radio nets and on Facebook for dinghy thefts, I’m always surprised by this, having sailed for 8 years from SE Asia to Mexico, we have never had anything stolen, we always take precautions, and would never tempt fate by leaving a expensive outboard dangling of the back of a dinghy in the night in a poor area, in fact we always lift the dinghy out of the water. Also these dinghies are often found on the beach downwind of the boat, with their engine missing. The bay made a pleasant stop, but the next morning we pushed on to the resort bay of Chacala

4th Feb – Chacala

We spent a couple of very pleasant days here, the fact that one of the beach restaurants did decent vegan options for Kathy helped. A lot of RV’ers seemed to like the camps here.

Our next stop would be Banderas bay, the bay of flags! Here is one of the biggest and popular marinas on the mainland coast, it’s also the place where many boaters gather before heading off to the South Pacific. We arrived at the peak of this, and there were many boats there preparing for their first serious offshore journey. More on this and our trip to Zihuatanejo in my next post, this one is getting too long.

Paul Collister
Thursday 23rd March 2023