Bahia Chamela, Jalisco, Mexico

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

019-35.055 N
105-7.880 W

Ahoy from Bahia Chamela!

[It appears that I forgot to send this blog when it was written due to a lack of Internet, so it's out of order as it describes events on Tue/Wed of this week.]

When you last heard from your intrepid adventurers, we were in a little bay called Ipala. From there we had a 50 nautical mile (~58 statute mile) SW run along the coast. We departed at around 6:30 AM and as there was no wind, we motored along on almost glassy seas. Sue has a knack for spotting sea turtles and before long she was spotting quite a few of them. By the time that she went below to grab some breakfast for us, she had spotted 7 turtles. I didn't want to let her down, so I started counting and by the time that she came up, I had spotted 25 more! It was actually very easy to spot them as the seas were quite smooth and you could easily see their shells sticking up out of the water. We're guessing that the turtles were congregating for breeding, so at some areas there were be lots of them, but then there would be very few. Anyhow, this turned into a day long game and by the time that we pulled into Chamela, we had spotted 104+ turtles, far exceeding our prior day's count of 33.

Anyhow, Bahia Chamela is the first real anchorage S of Banderas bay. It has a very nice point which provides protection from NW swell, but it's pretty exposed to SW swell, which is what we predominantly had. After a full day of motoring, we pulled in, dropped our anchor near a few other boats and put out our flopper-stopper and had a good night's rest. The next day we headed ashore to explore the beautiful beach.

One of the things that you need to deal with on the Pacific side is surf landings in your dinghy. So far we had managed to get away without having to ride the surf in, but no longer! The basic strategy is to wait outside of the surf line, determine the wave set count (waves tend to follow a pattern) and then ride in on the smallest waves. I'm happy to say that we rode ashore without issues. However, we did watch some other people who didn't quite get the timing down...

Anyhow, the beach at Chamela runs on for miles and is nice soft sand. In the NW corner of the bay there's a little town and the beach is lined with lots of palapa restaurants and fishing pangas along the water. As you move down the beach it becomes much more sparse with just the occasional hotel. Other than fishermen we really didn't see many other people. We had a nice lunch on the beach of shrimp and fish and were quite impressed as 3 kids took a panga out to go fishing.

During the day the anchorage filled in and by sunset there were 15 boats in the anchorage. What was really nice was that s/v Air Ops pulled into the anchorage and invited us over for drinks and dinner. We had met Dave and Merry last year in Puerto Escondido and they were great folks. S/V WendAway got rocked & rolled out of the anchorage at the islands in the bay and they pulled in and Wendy joined us. It was really nice seeing friends that we had made over the past 2 years in the Sea of Cortez.

Our plans are to try to go out to the islands and anchor there. Failing that we'll head on to another anchorage named Pariaso.

-- Geoff & Sue

P.S. Photos from Chamela are available here.

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For the cruiser:

We anchored in the NW corner of the bay in about 25' of water over sand. We had trouble setting and we saw several other boats with similar issues. It seems that you really need to let the anchor settle and then sloooowly back down on the anchor. If you start dragging, stop backing down and let it settle. We anchored at about N19-35.06 W105-07.88.

Log ID: 2203