Friday December 27 — Continued from yesterday… At 0940, we turned into the channel into Puerto Chiapas/Puerto Madero.
If our understanding is correct, Puerto Chiapas is the south side of the channel, which has a large navy base and the marina. Puerto Madero is the north side of the channel, which has a small fishing village. This is a photo of Puerto Madero taken from the main channel.
Thursday December 26 — Last night, we officially entered Gulf of Tehuantepec. The Gulf of Tehuantepec is “lowest landform between Mexico and Northern Central America, allowing unhindered wind passage from the Gulf of Mexico.” What that means is that it’s a giant wind tunnel that is often extremely treacherous.
Even though the weather forecasting model had predicted no wind, we’d learned the hard way that the adage “keep one foot on shore” was good advice for this Gulf. So, rather than cutting across the bay, we followed the shoreline. Had we cut across the bay, we could have reached our destination a half-day sooner, but we’d decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
As promised, the wind was light, the seas were calm and the ride was smooth. We were amazed at how little motion there was. It felt more like we were in San Diego Bay than the open ocean! It was another overcast night with no visible moon, making it very dark.
We neared Puerto Salinas around midnight, which is a busy shipping port. There was some kind of refinery in the port that made the air smell really smoky and dirty, so we had to keep the boat closed up until we were far away from the port.
By noon, the conditions were the same: very light wind and seas so calm that it was more like a lake than an ocean. It was 93.4 degrees Fahrenheit outside – the hottest day we’ve seen yet. With no wind, the heat was unbearable. We broke down and ran the AC.
We broke up several more bird parties throughout the day:
Wednesday, December 25 — The worsening of sea conditions that happened late on Tuesday night didn’t last long. During the wee hours of the morning, the wind calmed down, the lightning vanished, and the sea conditions began to slowly improve. By morning, the ride was calm and pleasant. The swells were probably about three feet with long intervals, coming from two directions, and almost no wind chop. It was totally overcast with ominous grey clouds.
In the morning, another pod of dolphins came to play at the bow. This group stayed for quite a while and did a performance for us, frequently jumping out of the water. We saw them do three spins, and we caught the third one on video!
Eric also saw a turtle in the morning. We forgot to mention that Eric had also seen a turtle a few days ago, too.
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