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: