One the way back from CCC we stopped at a recommended liquor store on Allende and Independencia. It turns out we’d been there before and it was right across the street from our favorite tortillaria and a strange/cool fishing store where I bought a rapala (rapala = 1 sierra). Cheyenne is yelling over my shoulder “stay on target! Quinar.” So… to quinine. Said liquor store had corn-free tonic. Described on the bottle as “agua quinada,” which we take to mean “quinined water,” and in turn means that the verb must be quinar: to quinine. Ultimately, it means I had to dig into deep storage for the remaining bottle of Sapphire.

We took the inner route along the beach inside the reef. There were lobster trap buoys everywhere here and panga guys buzzing around to attend them. I don’t know exactly what they are looking for but when they empty a trap, they throw back a lot of lobster (carrying eggs? undersize?); Jeff counted 19 lobsters thrown back from one boat. The fashion trend amongst the Abreojos lobster fishermen is a balaclava-type headdress made from an old t-shirt with eye and mouth holes roughly cut; a look reminiscent of the Elephant Man with a bit of Mexican wrestler. One boat that had been working near us came close, circled us once or twice then just tossed five lobsters onto our trampoline (we had to tell them to stop, since we are well aware that four is the absolute maximum three people can consume in one sitting). We were too surprised at our luck to get our act together enough to find some fresh, intact t-shirts in a reasonable amount of time. By the time we came out of the cabin with the shirts, they had motored away.

The anchorage at Abreojos was bumpy and unprotected and we were considering just heading back out after we got some supplies but ended up running into Tim and surfer crew Sean and Carlos from Bogtrotter who were inundated with shrimp and various impressive fish they had caught themselves. We ended up at their boat where we had an awesome seafood stew and yellowfin sashimi. I made a firm decision to catch a yellowfin (but I’d settle for a yellowtail, or in fact anything but another bonito) but we still haven’t caught any sort of tuna at all. So much for firm decisions. Tim is an astute man whose bilge is stocked with about 50 cases of that finest of fine wines—the infamous Two-buck Chuck—and after an evening washing this down with tequila, we abandoned any thought of taking off until late afternoon the next day.

(Ospreys nesting on the tops of the telephone poles in Abreojos.)