#51 / 2005 Tour 3: Sailing to Caleta de Campos

SECOND DAY AT SEA

#51


Term - palapa: a beach shelter made of fronds fashioned from a palm tree and shaped like an umbrella.

In Mexico many palapas line a beach, each offering various foods and services.

Sailing nine hours at 275 degrees we pull into Bufadera Bay in Caleta de Campos at sunset. We anchored by the only other boat in the bay and immediately someone yells out, "Hey, Rick."

It was another 32-footer with Rick's acquaintance Bill out of Santa Cruz sailing south to Zihuatanejo to drop off his mate, a fifty-something retired deejay named Cooper looking for more opportunities in life. He had to get to the airport. Captain Bill must have weighed in at about 80 pounds Joe joked; Cooper was a strapping hand, mighty easy on the eyes.

Within moments everyone had the dinghies blown up and were slugging down beers with tequila chasers at Gloria´s palapa on the beach.

We also met a couple of tourists at Gloria´s palapa, a Texan named Steve living in England and with a two-week vacation out of the country for the first time in over six years. His companion Heidi was staying around until April taking in South America all the way down to Argentina and Brazil.

Too bad about Cooper, having to catch that plane. But somebody has to go back and deal with the real world they joke. Everyone knows out there somewhere people are experiencing snow storms, tsunamis, war and famine. But it all seems so far away, sad, and in the ultimate scheme of a cruiser`s day, relatively unimportant. Cruisers over time develop a completely different perspective about time. They think in chunks of months, seasons, years, and rarely know what day it is.

The town of Caleta de Campos, the water beautiful, and we can see all the fish underneath the hull of the boat. Far different from our anchorage in Zihuat. The beach of brown sand stretches out for at least one mile, peppered with some coastal rocks reminiscent of Oregon`s coastlines.

We shared some of Steve`s roll-your-own shag tobacco from England, polished off the shrimp in garlic sauce (Joe and I shared one meal for eighty pesos or a little less than eight dollars with a two dollar quart of beer), and headed back to the ship in the dinghy. 

The dinghy leaks so you always get your feet wet when you sit down in it and it is a true challenge to keep anything you have brought onboard dry.

The sounds of the waves are classic and lull me straight to sleep.