April 4-5, 2013  Chacala to Banderas Bay

We left Chacala around noon heading for Banderas Bay.  This is the large bay where Puerto Vallarta is located.   We had planned for it to be an overnight trip with light winds, putting us there just at dawn.  I am not sure what we were thinking because it is only 30 miles.  Even allowing for an offshore tack or two, we would have been there in the early evening.  I think Alan was just anxious to be sailing again.  Anyway, just after sunset we realized we were almost there, unfortunately.  The moon would not be up until after midnight and there were reported to be a number of unmarked rocks and rocky islands.  I was definitely not anxious to navigate our way through all these obstacles in he dark, but we also did not want to just sail around in circles until dawn.  At least Puerto Vallarta is not a large commercial port so we did not have to worry too much about freighter traffic.

Alan decided we were going in.  We lined up all of our charts and cruising guides and gps devices and studied them closely. Alan put waypoints into the Navionics system.  We turned on the engine and the radar and began to feel our way around Punta de Mita.  I was a nervous wreck, but in fact it all went smoothly.  Quite soon we were around the point and the lights of the bay were everywhere.  Now we just had to find the anchorage.  We had decided to anchor at La Cruz, which is a small town on the north west curve of the bay, at least until we got our bearings.  According to the charts we should be there.  In the dark it was almost impossible to distinguish the boat anchor lights from the shore lights, especially since we had no idea what the anchorage looked like in the daylight.  I was on the bow peering into the dark looking for the other boats which should be somewhere around here.  All I could see was what looked like a long line of street lights on the coast.  Suddenly my eyes did a shift, like when you can suddenly see an optical illusion, and I realized that what I thought was shore lights were actually boat anchor lights.  They were all around us.  Somehow we found what seemed to be an empty space and dropped the anchor.  It will be interesting to see where we are in the morning.

One more adventure under our belt, “Entering a Strange Harbor in the Dark”