Isla Holbox, Mexico

We mentioned that shortly after anchoring in Alacran, we were visited by a scruffy but adorable little birdie who, after maybe thirty seconds of initial hesitation, entered our cabin and totally made himself (herself?) at home in our boat. Strangely, he was not worried about us at all, even when we moved around, and a couple of times he landed on our arms or knees. He explored the entire interior of the boat and settled into a lap pattern: cockpit to sink/galley area, where we had a squeezed lime sitting on the counter, pick at the lime (working on the scurvy), hop around and then make the short flight to the settee table, give Joshua the eye and then hop across the table flying up to the aft window shelf/ledge, start at the basket of shells/beach debris looking for insects, move onto the plastic lid I made a water dish out of and splash water all over the cabin, move on to the basket with pens and miscellaneous crap and look for bugs, tuck into the far corner hidey hole for maybe two seconds before emerging and making way back to cockpit, spend some time in cockpit and then enter forward cabin, do some stuff (we weren’t in there) and return to aft cabin around three minutes later to repeat the entire process over and over again. He never even pooped on our stuff either, or at least we never found it. Not yet.

About a day after we left Alacran, we were visited by another small bird; this time a swallow. It was a beautiful bird with iridescent blue/purple head feathers, long clean and smooth wing and tail feathers, a rust-colored throat fringed with a bit of black, and a pale gold breast. He landed on our boat and sat for a bit on the foredeck, then moved closer, closer (trying to get out of the wind), and finally perched on the edge of the cockpit before falling asleep. While asleep, we had total immunity and could move freely within inches of him; when awake, we were more careful because sudden movement of massive bodies freaked him out a little. He slept on and off for hours and nearing dark, crawled into the cockpit cubby to sleep. All night long we wondered if he was still inside the cubby because we never saw him fly away but in the morning, he was gone. (This one was a pooper though and our sail bag, which was stuffed in the cockpit locker, suffered.)

We saw a number of migrating swallows, among other birds like egrets, “songbirdies,” etc., all flapping madly for the southern US coast. Nobody else stopped to rest though.

All this friendly bird action reminded us of a photo we took in 2002 of what happens to little birdies who lose their inhibition. This is a street-snack stand that would appear in the evenings in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

[Click the image to see the full photo.]

At 4am this morning, we maneuvered ourselves into the ship channel, rolling with the large swell and dodging speeding sport fishers, strange towering oil-related machine-barge things, and a shrimper who was actually shrimping right in the middle of the channel. Where the hell were we anyway?

Once inside, I navigated by flashlight along the intercoastal channel until it got light enough to actually see the marker barrels and burnt-out nav lights (so lame!) and Joshua made coffee and Spanish tortilla for breakfast. We got to Key Allegro in Rockport (where Joshua’s grandfather, Tucker, lives) at 7:30am. He had no way of knowing what time we would arrive or if we anchored inside someplace off the intercoastal before heading in and we tried to call him using the last single minute of time on our Sat-phone, but it wouldn’t connect. We decided we could just anchor outside Key Allegro and row the bote up to his house but then we noticed that he was right there standing on his porch, waving his arms at us!

So we motored up the canal and not only is Tucker waiting with camera in hand, but so is Bill (Joshua’s uncle) and a big closed-cell foam “Welkum” hanging from the deck. (Sniff sniff!)

The boat is just quietly tied up right in front of the house and we are both sort of dazed—even though it took painfully long to get across that damned gulf, our arrival feels very sudden and time-warpy. The boat is an absolute mess inside (outside too, but the inside mess is physically painful) with days-old dirty dishes clogging the sink, cookie crumbs and coffee splashes in the cockpit, salt water crusting everything from spray that *somehow* got inside, bilges and everything in them drenched from salt water, wet foul weather gear hanging from every hook, dirty laundry, things that fell off their shelves on the floor…

We’ll deal with that all tomorrow. After we get some sleep.

[Isla Providencia, Colombia]

We arrived at Mansfield Cut this afternoon around 2 only to find it closed out by surf. I knew it was a small channel but it hadn’t occurred to me and I’m glad we arrived in the day when we could see the situation clearly. Cheyenne was not happy. Our choices were; head back south 30 miles to Port Isabel or go on 75 miles to Port Aransas. A strong current is running North along the coast so our decision was to head North down current, down wind, to Port Aransas. We had a thunderstorm last night that was really something. It only hammered on us for an hour and a half but we both think it was the worst storm we’ve seen on the TimeMachine. Luckily, I was on watch and the sails were already down. I desperately wanted some sail to help control the boat, but the hell if I was going to go up on the fore deck and try hank on the storm jib. It was all I could do to hang on while being bludgeoned by the awning as it tore itself to streamers. Cheyenne was not happy. I’ll let her tell the full story later.

[Isla Mujeres, Mexico]

We’re about 100 nautical miles east of Port Isabel. 26 degrees 05 minutes North, 95 degrees 21 minutes West. Our rudder bracket failed again this morning so we have it lashed on and are making way under much reduced sail. Waves are 4-6 ft but we’ve slowed enough to not be surfing. Our goal was Port Aransas but we’ve altered course to Mansfield Cut which is 30 miles closer. From there we will proceed up the intercoastal in protected waters. We haven’t run the motor since arriving in Isla Mujeres so we still have full fuel tanks. Mansfield Cut is within motoring range and if worse comes to worse we can motor in steering with the outboard.