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:

Around 1800, we started seeing a fishing boats. About our size. Thankfully, all the boats he saw on the radar were well-lit with the light pattern that indicates fishing, but none had AIS. Eric was worried that they may be dragging long lines and changed course to be really far away from them to avoid getting tangled in their lines. Eventually, he realized that they were too close together to one another to have long lines out, but it was possible they were dragging nets, so it was still best to stay far away from them. 

By midnight, we’d passed at least thirty fishing boats. There seemed to be no more ahead, so we breathed a sigh of relief. That was until 0130, when we came across another fleet of them. By 0530, we’d dodged another twenty of so. 

Dawn on Friday December 27:

At around 0700, Christi was on watch and saw something straight ahead that didn’t appear on radar. Once we got close enough, she realized it was a flag indicating a long line – and we were headed straight for it. See how tiny and hard to see the flag was, especially in the bright early morning glare?

We had to do some evasive maneuvering, which was tricky. When we looked more closely, we could see other buoys barely on the surface of the water We knew these buoys indicated the lines edges, and we had to do a few course changes to ensure that we’d fully cleared the net. This is a photo of the panga that launched that long line

At 0940, we turned into the channel into Puerto Chiapas/Puerto Madero… to be continued…