[Dressed bird restaurant art from Holbox.]

[I should have been taking photos of unisex hair salon art the entire time because there were so many really good ones but, well, next trip.]

Isla Holbox was full of birds I had never seen before, only one species of which we were able to photograph with any success. This successful winner was of course the pink Flamingo, which is an incredibly appealing bird of the color pink. Pink. We went out looking for them specifically after hearing that they were seen in these parts and by god we found them, eventually. Were almost ready to give up too after an hour or so of motoring or rowing around when it was too shallow to row. Finally we beached the bote on a little islet and went in search of horseshoe crab skeletons (we found maybe 12 billion). Then all of a sudden there they were, three of them, in a spot where they were not only a second before. We watched and photographed them for at least an hour.

Their beaks have fringy stuff on the inside, and they filter shrimp and other tasty snacks out of the bay sludge. Before they dipped down for a bite, they would do this goofy dance, rocking their knees back and forth and stamping around, presumably churning up the water and the goodies from the bottom.

Among the non photographed are a number of small guys of the “songbird” variety. One, which in my totally non-scientific, non-bird-book having opinion, probably might be called an oriol. It is a beautiful black and bright yellow-orange and it would not hold still for one second. The other cool little bird was a similar sized thing but this time, intense dark turquoise in color. We also saw some white pelicans, the first I’ve seen on this trip.

We got back to the boat Friday night and dismantled the bote for the passage to Alacran and across the Gulf of Mexico.

Isla Mujeres, Mexico

We left Isla Mujeres on the 24th for the short trip up to Isla Contoy. Inside the reef was pretty hairy. Not much protection from the eastern swell and very very shallow and somewhat murky water. We luffed the sails to slow down and picked our way through, but finally dropped anchor in the lee of the island off of a rocky beach. It wasn’t long before the guardaparque came by and told us to move. It turns out you can only stop at the island off the park station to take one of their moorings. After moving to a mooring, we went ashore to pay the park fee ($4 per person per day) then explored the nature trails. This took all of an hour and we spent some time talking to the park ranger before heading back to the boat. It’s a nice park, but it’s too bad you are very restricted in exploring it.

In the morning we couldn’t think of any reason to stay since we’d already seen all the trails so we dropped the mooring and headed for Isla Holbox. Everyone told us that “Isla Holbox is like Isla Mujeres 30 years ago” which is probably true. Except for internet cafes and lots of motorized golf carts, the streets are still sand and the atmosphere is low key and sleepy. We hope to find the flamingos.

Cancun, Mexico

We had no plans to visit Cancun, but we had to go pay a port fee which could only be paid at the Banamex in Cancun. It cost us $16 for ferry and bus fare to pay the $20 fee. So lame. We took the opportunity to visit an incredibly large grocery store where we spotted these boob shaped pan dulce. We remember blogging about other pan dulce resembling body parts in La Paz. This should also feed the prepubescent sex crazed googlers out there. “boob” (probably not used in the expected way) has recently surpassed “porta-bote” in our search engine statistics.

[Glittering lights from FIVE cruise liners.]

We’re back in Mexico again folks! Nearly a year after we exited Huatulco, going south, in an entirely different ocean…

Entering Bahia de la Assension was great fun, “Nine…eight…WHATS THAT DARK SPOT AHEAD OF US??? ARE WE OKAY? Eight…eight… SEVEN!!!! SHIT how shallow is it going to get? Fuckit, I’m going left. CAN I GO LEFT?” Joshua stood on the foredeck with the special sunglasses and assured me that we were not going to die in seven feet of water and that dark spot was just grass and to just chill out. Thusly we grumpily dropped anchor in the middle of a very large shallow bay with about a million miles of fetch in the face of a norther. Joy.

Joshua promptly sacked out the moment the anchor bridle was in place and I wandered around the boat gathering strewn crap from the outside and expunging pools of salt water from the inside. About thirty minutes after we got settled, the norther hit with 30+ knots of wind kicking up gnarly foaming windwaves. Our shade structure fwapped and generally looked pathetic and the boat bounced madly. But the anchor was well set in nice white sand in ten feet of water and we had about a zillion feet of scope out so DO YOUR WORST NORTH WIND.

We had been making overnight passages since Guanaja with a stop at Lighthouse reef. Conditions have been mostly uncomfortable with large and confused seas. The current, wind direction (keeps changing), and swell direction are always different and I’m guessing that’s what has been making things icky. Nights were notable for strange flickering lights in an otherwise totally clear starry sky. At first we just thought that our eyes were bugging out a little but it turned out that both of us were seeing the flickering lights so we decided that it must be some sort of lighting. “Harmless upper atmosphere lightning,” Joshua declared. I found it eerie, sort of an innocent precursor to something more ominous. The calm before the storm. Dolphins before the hurricane. White Russians before the karaoke.

The norther lasted almost exactly 24 hours and as soon as the wind shifted more east, we tacked back out of the bay for an overnighter to Cozumel (or Isla Mujeres if we made good time and passed Cozumel before it got light). But we did not make good time and it was an uncomfortable trip; we tacked back and forth the entire way and neither of us got any sleep. After 20 hours we had only covered some fifty (linear) miles though we had plenty of wind and a supposedly favorable current. Seas were just chop and bleah and wind was uggh and—oh, did I mention we blew our main and have been sailing on jib only since the Chinchorro banks? Even if we had mainsail capability, I probably would have wanted it down to keep sail area minimal in the strong gusty winds. The next day, late the next day, we were pleased as punch to pull into the clear waters off Cozumel and anchor just upwind of FIVE cruise liners, each about the size of a small planet. We paddled ashore and strolled amongst the modern.

Reviewing our photographs of Cozumel, it seems we didn’t really take many sweeping panoramas of, you know, Mexico or whatever. Rather we took photos like this:

Or this:

We ate tacos, drank refrigerated beers, and visited a large grocery store, where we walked the aisles gazing at all the shiny products, then bought limes and poblanos. The next morning we pulled anchor and headed for Isla Mujeres (called ‘Izla’—rhymes with ‘id’ and then ‘luh’—by the local cruiser VHFers), a day in which the wind maxed out at perhaps three knots and the chop was nauseating. We would have been happier to stay put but there was supposedly another norther on the way in less than 24 hours and Cozumel offered zero protection, so we unleashed the fifteen horses and slogged our way onward.

[Approaching Isla Providencia from the SE]

Enough people have asked us about the website (how to and stuff) that we’re pretty remiss in not having a general about page.

Dreamhost: The site is hosted by Dreamhost. There are many free blogging sites, but if you want complete control, no ads, your own email domain and stuff like that you need a real hosting service. We have the very generous sister-of-a-founder plan which isn’t generally available, but even for you it’ll be less than $10 a month. With 500GB of disk included that’s cheaper than buying a hard drive and they’ll keep it backed up for you. Use the dreamhost promo code “TimeMachine97” and get up to $97 off¹. Woohoo.

WordPress: The blog software itself is WordPress 2.3.1. It’s licensed under the GNU public license (that means it’s free and open source). Dreamhost has a handy installer that does most of the setup work for you.

Spam Karma 2: A handy plug-in for WordPress that keeps the comment spam at bay. It’s also GNU and it works unbelievably well. If only email spam filtering worked this good. If your comments don’t show up this is probably why. Try rephrasing without using the words “hot teen sex.”

Subscribe2: Another GNU plug-in for WordPress. This is what sends out new post emails to all of you on the subscription list.

Creative Commons: Everything on the site is published under a Creative Commons License. This means you can use the material for almost any non-commercial purpose (including derivative works) without getting permission. We definitely appreciate hearing about how you use it. We know pictures and articles have been used for various club newsletters and classroom activities. You need permission only if your publication has a cover price, contains ads, or is promotional material of some kind. Read the legaleze if you care.

Photos: We both take photos and usually don’t keep track of who takes which. Unless it’s a picture of a cow, in which case you can be pretty sure I took it. We use a Canon S2 IS and a Canon SD600 digital elph. We’ve had many digital cameras over the years and these are far and above the best. We like to have a pocket camera and a big camera. There is a direct correlation between lens diameter and photo quality that you can’t get around. The weight of the big camera allows you to take better pictures especially in low light or at high zoom. Moment of Inertia… A heavier object is easier to hold still. Also, the image stabilizer on the S2 is the cat’s ass. However, we usually don’t like to carry a big camera around populated areas. Hence the smaller auxiliary camera.

Who: The people from Latitude 38 pointed out that we don’t identify ourselves anywhere on the site except for vague references. We are Cheyenne Weil and Joshua Coxwell; from Oregon (more or less). Cheyenne is a jeweler and an artist. You can see her work at cheyenneweil.com. When employment is necessary, Cheyenne does graphic design, writing and editing. I find itinerant labor developing software. We both graduated from the University of Oregon (Russian and Physics, respectively).

¹The dreamhost promo code TimeMachine97 gives $97 off if prepaying 1yr or more and $51 off if paying monthly. This is the maxium possible discount we can offer in the dreamhost promo code program.