Punta Allen in Ascension Bay

Sunday, March 16, 2003

019-47.520 N
087-27.000 W

Ahoy from Punta Allen in Ascension Bay, Mexico!

The sail here was one of those perfect sails that make you really glad that you're on a sailboat. The winds were perfect, 10-15 kts from slightly behind and we were making 6-7 kts on calm seas. Life was wonderful! There was a bit of a current against us near the shore, but once we got out, we picked up 1/2 of a kt. Just great.

Alegria had gotten there the day before and we talked to them on the VHF. They had pulled in at around sunset and dropped their hook in the middle of nowhere. While it was calm when they anchored, it turned into a washing machine during the night. After a rather sleepless night they moved to the south anchorage behind Niccheban Reef off of Punta Allen. We got in at around 2:30 and I decided to be smart and to pull into the north anchorage behind Niccheban reef thinking that since we had SE winds that the more reef that I could put between us and the incoming seas, the flatter the anchorage. Good plan, bad results.

The anchorage was fine until about 8:30 that evening when we started rocking and rolling. Waves from about 3 directions were converging on the boat. In the dark I couldn't tell where they were coming from, but the end result was that every few minutes we'd roll 10-15 degrees to either side. The mast has chewed through a Teflon plate under it and when we'd roll, it would move just ever so slightly and make a terrible creaking sound. Believe me, you don't sleep well with that going on! The next morning when I got up I was amazed we were in some kind of current zone and that just 150' off to the west it was nice and calm! Arghhh!

I had done the weather on the NW Caribbean net the day before at the start of the forecast I mentioned that the previous evening I had noted cirrus clouds and some high cirrostratus clouds that give that milky look and cause ring halos around the moon and the sun. I commented that those are typically precursors of a warm front (low) coming through, but that there was nothing on the charts. Well, the following day it came through.

At around 9 AM the skies to the west suddenly became very dark and it was clear that a front was approaching. The winds switched in a flash from the SSE to the NW and the temperature dropped a good 10 degrees. A black cloud line approached and lashed the boat with rain as lightening crackled through the sky. The winds weren't too bad, staying in the 25 kt range, and the rain was very welcome as the boat had become encrusted with salt. We dragged about 150' as the bottom is thick grass and we had been set for SE winds. In about 1/2 of an hour it was over and Steven and I decided to go diving.

The Rauscher cruising guide showed "good diving" in the cut just north of us. Steven & I decided to check the anchor and then swim out to the cut. Setting the anchor as the easy part. Swimming against the current was quite a bit more difficult & I used up 500 lbs of air in the process. When we got to the cut there were good rollers coming through it and it wasn't very deep, so you definitely had to be careful. We worked our way around the cut and back south. There was nothing to see. We surfaced a few times to check our progress and were a bit surprised to see that the trailing edge of the front was working its way through and it was pouring with high winds which made for some big seas. We decided to just swim across the reef as it appeared to be reasonably deep. We'd swim forward with an incoming wave and then grab on to a piece of dead coral to keep from being swept backwards. It took a few minutes to get across, but we made it with no problems. We did find a nice nurse shark resting in some coral, some big rays, and a grouper that followed us home.

When we got back to the boat we found that the winds had been in the low 30s with gusts to 40 kts. The anchor held fine. Later that afternoon I sounded out the "brown bar" between the N and S anchorage. Rauscher shows that it's 2-3', but I found 8+ feet all of the way. Steven and Jayne came over for dinner and just as they arrived we moved BlueJacket to the S anchorage to escape a swell coming in the N cut. Knowing that you can get between these two anchorages is good news as it will save several miles of back-tracking to get out of here. We had a great dinner of beer battered Grouper and watched "An American President."

On Monday we're off to Punta Yu Yum, which is a whole 8 miles from here.

-- Geoff & Sue

Log ID: 348