2/24/14 Caleta Campos

A quick correction to the last post; we left Cabeza Negra at 4 in the morning, not at first light. Anyway, using our radar and AIS, we headed into the darkness, fortunately, there was not much traffic in the area, so we settled in for our watches. The wind was blowing already, but I didn't want to put the sails up in the dark, Karin agreed, so we motored until about 6 or 6:30.
We shut down the motor, (which is running nice and cool again!) and sailed for about 3 hours. Sadly, the wind switched to straight off the bow....fire up the motor again!

We've been wanting to take Jack on the local busses, so we thought, if we just carry him like people do with their small dogs, we'd be fine. We haven't tried yet.

Back to the passage; it was different from most days... we saw nothing, no boats, no birds, no dolphins. Thankfully, the thing Karin saw was a fishing net held up by two milk jugs.

We were at least 8 miles offshore, but there it was, right in front of us! Karin was at the wheel, and we decided to go around it, not taking a chance between the floats.

That being said, we had another opportunity to go around. As we approached the anchorage at Caleta Campos, there were two shrimp boats, about 2 hundred yards apart in front of the entrance to the bay. We couldn't tell if they were anchored or not, and it looked o.k. to go between them, but when in doubt; slow down, stop if you have to, and figure out whats going on. Sure enough, the one boat was being towed. Never pass between two vessels if you can avoid it. chances are, there's a cable down there.

We did a slow 360 and let them pass, then headed in to the anchorage, and settled in for the night.

Large surf crashing on the shore eliminated any thoughts of going ashore; and, we'll be leaving at 4 am for Ixtapa.

Along the way, we've been struggling with our dinghy deployment and recovery.

We now have a great system that takes 5 minutes, and we can hang the dinghy on the side for security overnight!