Tenacatita Redux (Or, You Know You're Getting Salty When a Crab Crawls Out of Your Ear)

 

What exactly do I mean, when I write of passing days and weeks sailing back and forth between the Tenacatita and Barra de Navidad anchorages?  I realize that it might hard to visualize the day to day life for people unfamiliar with cruising.  I hope this short, journal-ish post will help fill in the gaps and share more clearly what cruising life entails.  It should be read in non-linear time context with the previous posts on Barra (we were going back and forth, so it's a mashup).

The day before yesterday, we left Barra and anchored at the Aquarium anchorage at Tenacatita.  It’s less protected from swell, but has better access to good snorkeling and a row of palapa restaurants (it's the destination of the mangrove dinghy ride from the main anchorage, for reference).  In the morning, we were ready to take advantage of these benefits, to help offset the previous night's rolly sleep.

I tested my new speargun in the water next to Brightnest, but we decided to snorkel without my speargun first, as a reconnaissance mission to a new diving location.  We paddleboarded to the small beach on the west side of the rocks and dove in.   We saw some cool fish, especially schools of Surgeonfish, and I tried to harvest some sea urchin but the swell picked up and tossed me around like a rag doll.  I didn’t want to hurt the coral, or vice versa, so we paddled back to Brightnest and moved her to the main Tenacatita anchorage, which is better protected from that rolly swell.

Today I went for a run (first time in a while) on the dirt road along the beach.  During my cool-down walk I saw a pair of nesting Crested Caracaras!  I’ve wanted to see that bird since I first wondered at it in the pages of Sibley’s.  I was unable to get a pic, sorry! (It kills me.)

The main anchorage at Tenacatita, on my cool down run, when I missed getting photos of the Crested Caracaras.

Later in the afternoon, I spent about half an hour diving on the boat, replacing the sacrificial zinc anode on the prop shaft, which was badly corroded considering when it had last been replaced.  It’s tricky to work with a screwdriver underwater, while holding your breath.  Everything takes longer, and you can't drop anything without significant consequences. Plus, the sea teems with life, which grows on the hull from the moment it's splashed in the water - barnacles, plant life, shellfish, corals.  This is why marine hull paints are commonly "ablative", meaning they flake off while moving, to shed the hull growth.  Stay stationary too long without cleaning (scraping) the hull, you will create an artificial coral reef on your bottom.  Our hull wasn't bad at all, we'd had cleaned it a little over a month ago.  But still, enough tiny sharp shells and life had grown to slice my forearms as I held myself under the hull to change the zinc.  After I changed the zinc, and was resting in the cockpit, I told Jen that there was water in my ear that I couldn’t get out, no matter how much a wiggled my ears, or worked in q-tips, etc.  I decided to just let it work its way out, and kicked back in the cockpit, sipping a pina colada that Jen blended up, and reading a our trusty fish field guide.  

I finally felt a drop dribble out of my ear, and my hearing returned to normal.  I looked down to see, not a drop of water, but a tiny crab drop next to me!  A crab had crawled out of my ear.  An ear crab!  A tiny, spider-like ear crab…

And that's all I have to say about that.

A "day-to-day living" pic of fresh fruits and vegetables, after rinsing, drying in the cockpit before we store them below.

The table at the raicilla cooperative.  Raicilla is mezcal that is made in Jalisco, instead of Oaxaca.  The varieties of agave may differ. Note that traditionally it is drunk with wedges of agridulce orange, not lime or lemon.

We left a Brightnest stone on the beach.  You can't see my sweet sharpie-drawn logo from this view.