We stopped at Isla Isabella en route from Mazatlan to San Blas. Isabella is a bird sanctuary chock full of blue-footed boobies, brown boobies, and frigate birds. And some other cackling gull whose name I can’t remember (sorry!). We lucked out in that all three birds happened to be breeding when we visited; only the brown boobies breed year round.

The island is very small and there are paths all over it where you can walk through brown/blue booby breeding areas (they just nest on the ground), then through the trees where the frigate birds nest. You end up walking very close to the birds (it’s unavoidable) and it’s pretty amazing. They are not afraid of mammals and just regard you with irritation when you wander around; they don’t fly away when you approach them. We took a lot of photos.

Blue-footed booby. The feet really are blue.

Blue-footed booby family unit. Awwwww cute babies!!! These guys are pretty tiny; they grow nearly full-sized before the fluff starts to be replaced by mature feathers. The female booby makes a bleating sound that sounds like a cross between a toy trumpet and a kazoo and the male makes a hoarse cry that sounds like he’s been ‘debarked.’ They bleat/gasp at you when you get within 5-10 feet of the nest. Which is sometimes in the middle of the trail. Sheesh!

I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. That’s the male sticking his arse in the air (he makes a hoarse exhale/cry when he does this). We spoke with one of the ornithologists on the island and he called it “sky-pointing;” it is a mating display, among other things. The female is regarding him with some indifference.

Awwww! Booby love. This happened right after the mating display above. We sat around for a bit thinking we might get to observe some booby action but this is about as far as things went.

Male brown booby. They have chartreuse-colored feet and are really cute. All the boobies have great expressions but my favorites were the brown boobies.

Female brown booby. Cute! Cute!

Close up of a male brown booby. Interestingly, the brown boobies lay two eggs and when they hatch, the dominant baby kills the weaker baby. So the brown boobies end up raising only one baby. The blue-footed booby babies also do this but only if resources are scarce. I think we saw most blue-footed nests with both babies. However, even with two babies, one remains the dominant baby and probably gets the majority of the snacks.

Marine iguanas. When you walk through the trees, they tend to stay very still until you get to within a certain distance, whereupon they can’t stand it anymore and explode off into the brush.

Many circling frigate birds. They make very primeval clicking and shrieking sounds. It was kind of creepy winding through the trees, which form a sort of short canopy and the path is more like a tunnel. There are zillions of frigate birds above you at all times.

Frigate baby! Frigate birds have only one egg at a time.

The male frigate has a red sack that he blows up. They just hang around with all their necks ballooned out like this too. Looks pretty goofy.

We arrived in Mazatlan on the second day of Carnival, which is supposed to be the biggest party outside of Rio. Lucky us. Approaching in the wee hours, we were actually able to hear Mazatlan before we were able to really see it. The streets were filled with scaffolding and temporary party structures and stages. Daylight hours were spent checking the massive sound systems with whatever nightmarish pop the sound dude had on hand, restocking the thousands of cases of Modelo Especial, and clearing the debris from the night before. As evening approached, the streets along the Malecon were blocked off, souvenir stands set up along the streets lining the free side of the party and sold random crap like kewpie dolls or cowpunk hats, and by around midnight, half that Modelo had been consumed and the town pretty much went apeshit. Food stands sold gorditas (weird fat little pancake/patty/biscuit things), salted nuts, and hot dogs. We were hard pressed to find tacos and this was a shock after La Paz.

We spent a couple of days wandering all over old town Mazatlan and got near the Carnival party when after it was blocked off but didn’t really feel like entering. The crowds on the outside were enough and I was not feeling all that optimistic about the selection of live music on the inside based on the crowds of drunk and tarted up teenagers. I guess I’m officially old now.

Here are some photos we took.

We visited Mazatlan once before in 1996. After a long bus ride from Tijuana, we arrived during a torrential downpour; we waded across the street to the nearest hotel (possibly this hotel was called “The Moldy Cockroach”) and promptly passed out for several hours. When we came to, it was still pouring but we felt like we should see something of the place so we got our rain gear on and started walking. The wrong way. We ended up in an area called ‘dorado beach’ or something like that; it’s the developed tourist section of town and a long way from the main center of Mazatlan. By the time we got there, we were hungry and there was nowhere to eat except freakish mega-resort restaurants and American fast food chains. We were thoroughly traumatized by the experience and left Mazatlan the next day. We’ve held the opinion that Mazatlan is a total dive ever since but then we had no idea that we were never really in Mazatlan.

Um, the point of all that was: Behold The Quaint!! Building in Old Town.

As it turns out, downtown Mazatlan is really very nice. The market is large and functional (actually has normal market fare and not just shot glasses and sombreros) and in a cool art nouveau-ish building. Buildings around town were varied and interesting with a lot of colonial, neo-classical, and art deco facades.

There was some cool graffiti in Mazatlan.

There were also a lot of abandonadas, many of them being consumed by their own gardens.

We arrived in Mazatlan at 5:00 this morning just in time for carnival.

Our fishing luck seems to have turned around. We hooked two sierras on our way into Playa Bonanza. We got one on deck but the other fucked off with our rapala. That thing cost $20 and only caught 2 fish. Oh well, I guess you have to expect it. Hopefully it will be a bonus for some mexican fisherman.

We left Punta Bonanza at about 7:00 toward Mazatlan and just as we were rounding the northern tip of Isla Cerralvo we caught 2 bonito. We threw one back and left the lures in the water. Later we caught our first dorado which made a great breakfast especially since we had butter. Mmmm. Butter. Mmmm. Dorado.

We left with a norther because we didn’t want to end up motoring the whole way. The wind was nice 15-25 kts nnw but the seas were pretty ugly. 6-8 ft and steep (about 5s).

Day 2 was better. Especially because we caught our first yellow-fin tuna. I had to wake up Cheyenne to steer while I reeled it in. However, cleaning the thing in those seas was a mess. I was completely covered in fish blood. Yummy though so it was worth it. We’ve been having seared tuna for every meal with no end in sight. The bonito will have to wait.

We got back to La Paz Saturday night, took some excellent showers, abused our flush toilet privileges, and went out for tacos and refrigerated beer. The next day was Sunday and we spent the morning listening to Bill’s Net and then headed out for more tacos and various boat supplies. Bill has a half-hour or so discussion net every day on channel 21 starting around 7:30am. He usually lists off some headlines culled from various internet searches and the BBC, comments on them, and then invites whoever is listening to come ahead with their own comments. Pepe is the first to comment every day. “Pepe go.”

Today was a slow news day, or else Bill missed this morning’s BBC news. “So anyone try out that stuff, ‘tor… er, tongue-fu’? Supposed to be some sort of soy curd. You eat it. Anyone know anything about this stuff?”
… Silence …
Someone speaks up finally, “Do you mean … tofu?”

Mind you, the discussion was previously all about Cheney and how there were women with Cheney and the shot guy (makes you feel like you’ve been out of town when you come back to discover that Cheney shot some dude in the face and nobody seems too concerned) and how they were not the wives of the men and just who were these women anyway. Then Clinton. The tofu thread was a short-lived one but actually enticed some of the boat women to comment. We’re back to typical topic matter with the Patriot Act now and the boat men have taken over once again.

Yesterday while loading some gasoline cans into the dinghy, this guy came over and started talking to us. We chatted about the Port-a-bote, then where he lived previously—he had lived in Maui for several years and then San Francisco—and if he knew this person or that person. Then we get to talking about where in San Francisco he lived, and he mentioned the Boat Club, which was just up the street from where we used to live, and we said something like, “Oh! We know a guy from the Boat Club!”
“Really? Hey who do you know?”
“This guy named Joe Cool.”
“Really. [pause] How do you know Joe Cool?” Each word carefully measured.
“We met him on this guy Mark’s boat and blah blah blah” Chat chat chatterson…
“Um. I’m Joe Cool!” And clearly do not remember you.
He looked very different from the last time we saw him. But he remembered Mark and Mark’s boat and it all came back and he filmed us a bit with his camera to make sure he would remember us for next time. We decided to meet up with him in Tenerife when we get there, or at least look up his buddy at the kiteboard shop. This is the third person we’ve met along the way connected with the marina at Rio Vista where we bought Time Machine.

Anyway, we plan to hang around town for just a day or two, stock up on food and fuel, and then if the weather looks good, head across the Sea of Cortez to Mazatlan. It’ll be a while before we get back to La Paz and so the remainder of time not spent scouring town for supplies will surely be spent stuffing ourselves silly at all our favorite street food stalls.

La Paz’s tractor beam is sucking us back down the coast to its bouncy anchorage on the pretext of obtaining a part for our busted traveler. Will we ever escape and get someplace warm?

Now that we have a SSB receiver radio, we get to listen to Don From Summer Passage, also known as Don The Weather Guy. Every cruiser in this area knows about Don but we just ‘met’ him, so to speak. He broadcasts from Oxnard at least twice daily on various SSB channels and gives a very perky rundown of the weather in all the key areas. “Gulf of Tuehuantepec? Will be screamin’. That’s right, 60 to 70-knot winds!! [Perk perk!] Pretty nasty stuff and you don’t want to be out in that. Not a bit! Seas 20-25 feet too; that’s as high as I’ve ever seen it! So any of you think you are going to make the crossing in that, well, you can just tell me how it was in the Afterlife! Ha!” Luckily the southern Sea only had a predicted 20+ norther and we took off south with ambitious destinations. We made it almost to Agua Verde and the wind died. Bleah. Motored in and anchored just as it began to pick up again. We hung out and attempted to take off the next day (the ‘peak’ day, according to weather reports) but didn’t even get out of the bay, the winds were so light. I couldn’t see any whitecaps anywhere with the binocs and another boat that had left ahead of us was still visible on the horizon, sails luffing in the nonexistent wind and big leftover swell. We returned to anchor and did boat projects. The next day we tried again and had good wind nearly to our next destination, when it again died completely, leaving us to motor into the anchorage at Gatos.

Again we had a good time at Gatos. Maybe the most spectacular land scenery we’ve seen at any anchorage anywhere. We hiked for several hours in the other direction this time. The mountains are layered with many different colors of dirt/rock and so when you hike around, you go through all these different colored areas. It’s just a really cool place.

Manuel the fisherman intercepted us as we attempted to leave Gatos for points south but there was no wind and no sea and we were just sitting out in the glassy water. He motored up and sat on our ama chatting with us for a bit holding onto his panga by a light leash. We told him we’d likely be pulling up to the beach at Timbabichi (a mere two miles south of Gatos) unless the wind performed a miracle and began to blow and he said if we did, he’d stop by later with some fish for us. Sweet!

A few hours later, anchored in Timbabichi, Manuel arrived with the goods: ‘chocolates.’ (What the?) They are large brown shiny clams and we traded some pesos for 20 of them. We asked Manuel how to cook them and he said you just boil them or whatever, like normal clams, which is what we did. They were great, not sandy at all; maybe a little on the large side if there were any complaints. Later, we ran into a couple in La Paz who were traveling around Baja with a camper and a folding kayak and the guy said that the best way to eat them was to take a large thin knife and split them right down the middle (uncooked, alive), then eat them like oysters on the half shell with lime juice and hot sauce. We told him that we boiled them with garlic butter and he went into fits. “AAHHHH!!! You ruined them! You ruined them!!” And his wife kept saying, “You didn’t ruin them, they are good no matter how you prepare them. Jeez!”

Chocolates! Boiled, not raw.

The next day we had light wind and crept south towards San Evaristo. Then the wind picked up insanely and we made wicked time. We pulled a bit of a Punta Baja when rounding the corner into the anchorage; winds that run over land intensify to insane proportions and generally anchorages are windier than the outside. Just another way life is not fair.

The next day we hopped over to Ensenada Grande on Isla Partida for the evening, chatted with a kayak guide from La Paz who was camped on the beach and returned to our boat to find that we had dragged anchor!! Ooop. It DID seem farther paddling back… We reset the anchor (it had reset itself but now were not in the position we wanted to be in) again and it held fine. We are not sure what caused it to drag; maybe it slid on some grasses? Hooked on the edge of a rock? Pretty embarrassing; I wonder if any of the other boats noticed. (“And they allll moved away from me on the bench…”)

We arrived in La Paz once again in the evening and stuck our anchor down right smack in the middle of the channel. “Hey, here’s a great wide open space where nobody’s anchored! Score!!” We discreetly moved the next morning when we realized where we were and again wondered if anyone noticed.

Don’s weather report was for northers and good sustained winds in the 20-25 knot range, “right down the middle!” so we did our restocking as fast as we could and headed out to cross the Sea of Cortez two days later.