Blog November 2025 Chiapas to Barra de Navidad?
Monday 17th November 2025
6:30 AM, Up and a quick breakfast
09:30 Pay marina bill and wait for customs
10:00 Customs/Imigration/Military Marines and Harbour Master send me on my way
As I motor out of Chiapas, for what I expect will be my last time I’m wondering what the passage will bring. I’m quite optimistic that the autopilot will work, the weather window is good and it should be a pleasant passage to Huatulco. Carlotta and Mehdi come to the last pontoon to wave me away and Medhi drops his trousers and waves his bare bum while shouting farewells to me, it must be a French/African custom.
I clear the breakwater and turn on the autopilot, it starts to drift off course too much, so undeterred I do a couple of rotations where I turn the boat thru 360 degrees in a big circle to force the compass to calibrate. The compass holds course better but after a few minutes looses the plot again. I repeat with circles in the opposite direction, then a mixture of both. By now I’m out in the rolly ocean and realising that I might have a problem.
I make the decision to go ahead regardless. I have the wind vane steering which I can use to control the course when sailing, however the wind is weak and from dead ahead so that’s no use at the moment. I figure if the worst comes to the worst I can just drift and get a little sleep as needed. It’s around 48 hours passage time to Huatalco, the other side of the Gulf of Tetuhuanapec and I have a good 4 days before the next storm is due to blow through the gap there. I’m very wary of these storms, and if you want a taste of what they can do, have a look at this book about a Salvadoran fisherman who was found on January 30, 2014, aged 36 on the Marshall Islands after spending 14 months adrift in a fishing boat. He was caught in a blow right here.
The afternoon wind is strong enough for the wind vane to steer for a few hours, later with the wind on the nose and motor sailing I find the boat can steer itself for an hour or more unattended with the mainsail hauled in. I grab sleep wherever I can. I have an alarm that goes off every 15 minutes when I wake up and quickly scan the horizon, check the engines vital statistics, and reset the clock for another 15 minutes.
Mostly I have to steer by hand for the 50 hours passage. Normally one uses the compass for the course, you can’t steer by the GPS readout as that has too much lag, so when the boat veers to port, then veers back to starboard, the gps might be showing the port veer when it’s actually now veering to starboard.
This also requires me to stand behind the wheel, in order to see the compass. The compass has some lag, but it’s much easier to manage.
So my preferred technique is to make a comfortable place in the rear of the cockpit, in a seat, or on a cushion at the side, reclining, and steer the wheel from the side with a hand, or maybe a foot, and use a cloud in the daytime, or a star at night as a bearing. This works really well, except in the daytime there were rarely any clouds, just blue sea and blue sky and one big long flat horizon. At night there would often be a haze stopping me from seeing any stars.
Tuesday.
Another long day and night ahead of me, I’m tired but I console myself with the fact I’m halfway across the bay. I had prepared a half a dozen hard boiled eggs and cooked some Spanish Tortilla (Omelette) so I have easy food available, I also have a handy supply of bread rolls, cheese and butter.
It’s a more difficult day, I don’t get much sleep and I’m falling asleep standing up behind the wheel. I worry about being capable of anchoring the boat after the remaining 4 hours I have to go. However, the wind picks up in the afternoon, as it usually does, and swings enough for me to set the sails and wind pilot (Monitor wind vane) and let the boat sail itself into the bay. I get my head down for the next 3 hours, (15mins sleep, 2 mins lookout) and feel quite refreshed before I arrive into Maguey Bay. In front of me I can see the guys on Lee’s Moody yacht (that’s the make, not the atmosphere), I think it’s called Dream Catcher.
Wednesday, 17:00
Arrive in Huatulco exhausted but happy
First thing I do is jump overboard and have the first decent swim for a year. It’s a great feeling.
Thursday
I’m up early after a well deserved sleep, I decide to work on the autopilot and fix the problem. When I smell what I assume is burning coming from inside the motor that drives the rudder my heart sinks. This is not something you fix at sea. In fact the whole autopilot is maybe 30-40 years old and I can now reliably say is a bin job.
Here I might use the phrase ‘It is what it is” however that isn’t going to help anyone. So time to remember what plan C was.
In the meantime I spend the day snorkelling with the fishies, and chatting with my neighbours, Lee, Grace, Courtney and Jake.
Friday
More chilling and swimming, and at some point I remember Plan C. I have a tillerpilot on board, this is an autopilot device for smaller boats that steer with a tiller, not this kind of boat which has a wheel. , However some ingenious folks have found a way to connect the tiller pilot to the wind vane of the wind steering and use that to steer the boat. Some online research has me very optimistic and I set about building the brackets I need to connect it all up. There are many variables to play with here, location, angle, left or right handed, up/down etc. I can’t easily test these at anchor, so I construct it all with some flexibility built in and will test it out on the next leg.
Saturday 22nd Nov
Depart Huatulco, for Acapulco,
I leave very optimistic for the tillerpilot on the Windvane. But I wait a few hours before I try it, I’m going to be in for a rough time if it doesn’t work. Eventually I plug it in and it’s working back to front, no problem, I reverse the control ropes to the wheel, now it seems to work, but is acting a bit crazy, slamming the arm backwards, constantly jamming against the end stops then doing the opposite. It won’t last long with all this activity, so I turn it off to ponder some.
My Memory of the following days isn’t so good, I had hoped to get there on Monday morning, but it ended up taking 3 days instead of 2. There was a strong current pushing me back, I would guess 2 knots most of the time, On Sunday the waves got to a couple of metres high and the wind was running at more than 20 knots on the nose. I was getting very exhausted trying to hand steer against this. At one point I decided to tack out using the windvane then tack back, this would allow me to get some sleep and even if it was going to be a hard beat, without too much headway I was happy for the break.
I headed off, making a good angle to the wind, I sailed close hauled, 45 degrees to the wind for around 3 hours, then I tacked, I was close to a headland which I think was making the current and waves worse, but after three hours tacking back, and ending up a little closer to the shore than I wanted I was gutted to find myself back where I had started. The wind was still strong, So I tacked again, and headed back out to sea, I decided to just hang around here until the weather improved, and get as much rest as possible.
Later that evening the wind disappeared and the sea started to calm, I put the motor on and headed back on my direct course to Acapulco.
As the sun started to set a little bird arrived, like me he seemed exhausted, he seemed so far out from land for such a little bird, I worried that he was blown out and might not have the strength to get back to land. I made him a nest in my old sombrero, and put some food and water out, not really sure what these guys eat, I gave it a choice of some of my tinned tuna I had just made a buttie with, and some bimbo bread. It politely declined everything and after a bit of preening went asleep in that spot. About 4 hours later, in the middle of the night, it was gone, either flew away or fell off. I consoled myself with the knowledge that these things can migrate across massive continents, and that 20 miles offshore was probably a little stroll for it.
I was again hand steering and on the verge of falling asleep. I was now close enough to the shore to steer by lights on the land through the night. It was this bit of the passage when the hallucinations started, they helped break up the monotony of the trip greatly. I was focused on a lighthouse way off in the distance ahead, maybe 25 miles away, it was very weak but good enough to steer by. Often I would doze off and wake with a jolt and realise the lighthouse was behind me now and I had done a 180 deg turn in the few seconds I had nodded off. Not good. However there was no other traffic around to worry about and I was still 5-10 miles offshore. There was however a big brown tanker that kept trying to ram me. It would appear on my port side, it looked weird, like it was made of hard mud, but would get closer and closer until I could see the decks and porthole on the side. I would blink, shake my head, and it was gone. A few minutes later it was towering over me about to crash into me. At one point I thought it would be fun to find out what happens when you get run over by a massive cargo ship, so I didn’t blink and dispel the illusion, but let it crash over my bow. Sadly nothing happened and it just disappeared. My other hallucination was a white flag that kept waving around right in front of me, it would come and go, but had a very strange appearance. I decided it might be a small panga fishing boat, and I think it might have been, so I decided not to see what happens if I just hit it like the cargo ship. It seemed to be heading for the lighthouse too, but disappeared as I approached Acapulco.
a few hours before Acapulco I did another falling asleep incident, this time for a few minutes and again woke to find myself going the wrong way.
Tuesday 25th Nov 08:30
Arrive into Acapulco.
The last few hours were a lot better, I could see the bay that would be my refuge, I had messaged Vincente, the owner of three mooring balls there and arranged to pick one up. Normally he meets you to help get the buoy, but because I was expecting to arrive in the middle of the night I told him not to bother. Once in the bay, I picked up the buoy on the first attempt and was very quickly asleep in my bunk. The relief was fantastic.
I slept for 5 hours solid, two other boats , Way to go 2, and the cat Ikigai are here, but leave before I wake up. Perhaps I need to remove the ‘Liverpool’ bit from my signage (for non scousers, Liverpudlians have a very unfair reputation for stealing anything not bolted down).
Acapulco in the state of Guerrero is a great city, it has a massive natural harbour and I stayed in an inner bay at the west end. As I wrote in the blog on my previous visit, Acapulco was devastated by a massive hurricane 2 years ago. I was north in a boatyard in Guaymas at the time getting Sister Midnight ready to launch. At the time there was a depression forming near Acapulco and threatening to turn into a hurricane, but was expected to be weak. Later that day I mentioned to an American in the boat yard that I had heard on CNN how the depression had formed into a hurricane and built strength rapidly as it approached land and was a Cat 5 hurricane when it made a direct hit on the city. The American looked at me, and said CNN, Fake news, it’s only a small depression. I think we know which way he votes.
In fact the rapid intensification of the storm was quite a thing, meteorologists hadn’t expected it and along with other weather events it fell into the ‘Possibly related to climate change’ category, so again Fake news eh!.
When I was last here the place was badly smashed up. All the docks were destroyed, all the boats, and there were hundreds of them, ended up at the bottom of the bay, or up on the beaches and roads above. The boats on land have now been removed and the Club Yates, and another marina are back up and running. However the damage is everywhere to be seen. When you see a tall hotel being built, first they have open floors with vertical columns waiting for the internal walls to be built, well that’s the state many of the hotels and apartment blocks reverted to. The force of the wind removed all of the interiors, and just left the basic concrete structure. Sometime you assume it’s a new build that stalled, until you see half a floor still has some internal walls.
The next day I headed into town, my Spanish is getting better and I’m not so shy to try it with Mexicans now, but something went wrong at the checkin and although I thought I had checked in I hadn’t. I’m not sure what I actually did, but I’m all signed up for something now.
A provisioning run in the blistering heat restocked my supplies and I had a few days resting on SM.
I decided to head over to the fuel dock in club Yates as the tank was almost empty after the long run from Chiapas, this is were things went badly wrong.
I tied up at the fuel dock, placed my 8 jerry cans out in a line on the dock and was told the staff were on their break and would return later, everything seemed perfect. The attendant returned after some time and started to fill my main tank. He got to 250 litres, which is usually all the tank takes, but it kept going, both of us keeping an eye on the overflow / air vent that usually gurgles and spits out some diesel when the tank is full. He called out 300 litres, and I joked and said I didn’t think it took that much, I went below, everything seemed ok, no smell of diesel, the tank gauge was showing full, so I went back up and said we must be almost done.
He called back 400 Litres, and I was very confused, he was now going very slow as he could hear the tank was full from the noise coming back up the filling pipe.
He called out 500 litres and then I thought STOP something is very wrong here. I went below and pulled the cabin sole boards (Floor panels) and saw a few hundred litres of diesel in the bilges. Not for the first time in recent days my heart sank and I felt like calling it a day.
I was deeply pissed off at how this boat was getting back at me for my lack of maintenance and brain power. I didn’t know what had happened, my first though, there’s a hole in the tank, that’s a nightmare to deal with on this model of boat, So I pulled up more boards and found the problem.
A hose clamp had failed and the overflow pipe on the top of the tank had detached and diesel was pouring out of the top of the tank into the bilge
This I can fix easily. Back on deck I explained to the fuel man that I had a major problem and would need ‘a man with a bomba (pump)’ To his credit, and in a typically Mexican way, he told me to chill and he would get it sorted. 30 minutes later a crew turned up with lots of empty plastic 10 gallon drums and a big electric pump.
To cut a long story short, I was back on the mooring buoy a couple of hours later with a full tank, 8 full Jerry cans and a £1500 hole in my wallet.
The money was a pain, but that’s just money, my worry was how did I let it get so bad without stopping the filling at 300 litres. I have never emptied the tank, as that’s not advisable on a sailboat, so I’m never really sure how much it can take, but 250-300 has to be the max. The tank is made up of two smaller tanks and they change shape as they get deeper making the fuel gauge not give a linear readout. I think the tank is half empty when the gauge shows 2/3rds full. Regardless, I lost the plot and that worries me most. This along with other factors is making me think hard about what’s next with my sailing life. More on this later.
I had intended to leave that afternoon, but the trauma made me decide to wait another day, then set off for Zihuatanejo On Sunday
Monday 1st December 17:00 . Off to Zihuatanejo.
I had a great passage to Zihua, Light winds, a little sailing, a lot of diesel smells, but the chance to flush the small amount of diesel in the bilges while a long way offshore after diluting it with an emulsifier (Fairy Liquid/Dawn). I was able to sail for most of the last ten miles into Zihau bay. I headed to the beach area called La Ropa, it’s a long way from the town area and the dinghy landing spot, but the water is very clear here. Also I have the place to myself. I had trouble setting the hook on the first attempt, I’m new to this anchor really, but once set it was in good and proper and I could once again chill.
I love Zi, it’s such a pretty place, the people are lovely, you can buy fish at the beach market each morning when the fishermen arrive at dawn and lay there catch out. They have great bakeries, and a few big supermarkets for the luxury food.
The main Mercado area is fantastic for fruit and veg.
Zi is geared for tourists, just around the corner is Ixtapa, a major holiday destination, along the lines of Cancun and Cabo San Lucas, huge big name hotels and millions of gringos on long white beaches. I hate it there, but Zi is more traditional, catering mostly to Mexican tourists, and quite a few more discerning gringos.
While here I worked out when best to leave and how to manage the next few passages to get to Barra de Navidad to meet Kathy, Its turns out it’s probably best I do 2 overnighters, which without the autopilot, doesn’t appeal. When I checked the flights to Barra from Mexico City for Kathy, it turns out they are infrequent, expensive and a long way in a taxi or coach from the nearest airport. However Ixtapa airport is a short bus ride from here and so to kill many birds with one stone, I suggested to Kathy we have Christmas in Zi, then in the new year we can both motor North. Kathy agreed so I set about organising a very chilled few weeks before Kathy gets here.
With flights and hotels booked, everything was ready for me to fly to Mexico City on the 18th, meet Kathy, stop over and the next day fly back to Zi for Christmas.
I dived on the hull and gave it aclean, I was also pleased that I could change the anode on the prop without scuba gear, just by holding my breath and taking things slowly, one allen screw at a time.
The Autopilot.
I turned my attention to the autopilot. They have a DHL office here, so I decided I could get a new system shipped here and have a go at fitting it. I turned the old one on to see if I could learn anymore, and lo and behold the motor ran, it steered the rudder, but without the compass I had ripped out, I couldn’t get any further. Why I had smelt burning I’m not sure. I suspect it might have just been related to the engine which had been running a while, I don’t know and I’m sure I will find out.
It’s not possible to replace the motor without major surgery in the form of lots of welding and cutting of steel. So the other option is a ram and a tiller arm. There are two types of Ram, electric and hydraulic, all for around £2000, the tiller arm, if I can find one that fits off the shelf could be £500-1000, and the Ram will need fiberglass work on the boat to create a mounting point for it. So as a compromise, I have ordered a ray marine EV-400 sailboat kit and I’m going to see if it can drive the existing motor. A man at Raymarine technical support was very insistent that I would have no problem. However looking at Raymarine’s sizing charts, it seems my existing motor is underpowered, so this will be a temporary solution, even if it works fine. I would have to buy the same kit to control a motor or ram regardless, so this seems to be a safe option.
So a lot has happened and there’s more in the pipeline. But I’m now at the point where I’m considering the next phase. My gut instinct is that this might be my last season as a boat owner, not so much because of the problems I’ve had lately, I like a good challenge, it’s more that things are getting repetitive, and slightly boring. It’s hard to imagine a life hanging out in Paradise can be so, but I think I need a different challenge now. I’m toying with selling the boat after Christmas and heading home. I might just take her up to Guaymas and put her into long term storage, which will cost a few hundred pounds per month while I see if I can hack life back ashore. We will have to see.
Paul Collister, 12th Dec 2025.