On June 1 we raised anchor and left Acapulco, Guerrero, for Oaxaca. Three days later we dropped anchor in a hurricane ravaged Puerto Angel.
The day before we left Acapulco, Hurricane Agatha had hit the Oaxaca coast. We hoped to use the dying winds after the storm to push us down the coast. We had been seeing debris such as branches and tree trunks as well as trash, well offshore as we were sailing south towards Oaxaca. Surprisingly we were also a chosen spot for a hive of bees that must have been washed out to shore. We found the queen looking for a suitable home on board our Rua Hatu. Unfortunately she and her friends couldn’t stay.
Upon arriving in Puerto Angel, the air was filled with smoke and the occasional hammering or electrical tool noise broke the silence. The buildings directly on the beaches were shredded. Their palm leaf roofs torn and ripped off. The coconut palms around town looked sad with the majority of the leaves gone or bent in unhealthy angles. The town’s pangas, little fishing boats, that are normally anchored in the bay in front of town were all shoved to the peaks of the sand birms that seemed to either have been erected as protection from the storm surge or were pushed up the beach by said surge. I hope it’s the former.
That night we were hoping to catch up on much needed sleep before we continued south. At 1:30 Nic was awoken by splashing around the boat. A person had swam from the beach all the way to Rua Hatu, about 300 meters away, and was trying to climb into our dinghy. Unfortunately for him, his stature was too short and he seemed too intoxicated to be able to climb from the water into the dinghy. Nic, the kind soul he is, took the SUP board and got in the water with the intention of getting the guy back to shore. The swimmer was also too intoxicated to get onto the board, so after a twenty minute back-and-forth, the guy decided it was time to swim back to shore and leave us be. While he was trying to get aboard we learned that he was from Mexico City. Unfortunately further information about him escaped us as understanding “drunk” Spanish is a real challenge.
After an eventful night, we went to shore in the morning to get a few more food items before our next leg south. The weather forecast looked like another spinning storm was brewing offshore about eight to ten days out. Despite our intention of visiting Huatulco and exploring the coastline of Oaxaca, we decide to head south.
The leg from Puerto Angel to Puerto Chiapas, on the other side of the notoriously windy Gulf of Tehuantepec, was another 250 miles and the forecast looked promising. We had three days of wonderful, fast sailing. Unfortunately about 50 nautical miles from Puerto Chiapas at 22:30 at night our forestay detached from the top of the mast with a solid thud.
The genoa, our big foresail, lost its sharp front edge and it’s ballooned shape. Knowing that the mast had less support now, we reduced sail coverage by furling the genoa (wrapping it around the forestay for storage), raising the staysil (the smaller, inner foresail), and raising the mainsail but at the second reef, hereby moving the center of gravity further down the mast and allowing the inner forestay of the staysil to take some of the stress of the pitching mast while we motor. This allowed us to keep the boat stable while motoring into our safe harbor.
But since we are on a boat, we have to fix it in exotic places. The diesel engine’s cooling system was not cooling the engine properly and we were forced to run the engine at low RPM to reduce the chance of overheating. In the process of trying to fix the engine cooling problems, Nic replaced the thermostat, cleaned out the heat exchanger, and other, unfortunately fruitless tries keep the engine cool.
We motor-sailed very slowly at 2 to 2.5 knots towards the entrance of the channel into Puerto Chiapas. Here we will inspect what happened to our forestay and get the boat ready for sailing to Costa Rica.
