To Pacific Mexico

Date: May 20, 2023

We left Costa Rica in mid-April to travel on to Mexico. We skipped Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala so it was a 5 days non-stop sail. We did not see a lot of boat traffic on the trip but quite a lot of wildlife.

Here is a map of the approximately 860 nautical miles we have sailed from leaving Panama until arriving in Mexico including our time in Costa Rica:

Twice we had a bird do an over-night stop on the boat. The first one was a brown booby that sat at the corner of our solar panels from sunset until sunrise where another booby flew by to "pick it up" and go fishing:

We saw lots of dolphins, birds and turtles on the trip. In addition to resting on our boat, the birds like to stand on larger pieces of trash or branches floating in the water. However, this bird is not standing on trash but on the back of a turtle swimming at the surface of the water:

We did see birds standing on turtles' backs a couple of times on that trip, so it must happen quite regularly. The turtles were quite big.

Unknown species of booby flying past the boat:

Off the coast of Guatemala we caught a rope with the keel (marked on our route on the map above). The rope was floating close to the surface held up by small white plastic bottles and probably was attached to some fishing net hanging down deeper in the water. Fortunately, we did not catch the rope in the propeller but Bjarne had to don his snorkeling gear and jump in the over one km deep water to push the rope off the keel:

The last sunset of the trip:

We arrived in Marina Chiapas in Mexico, about 30 km from the Guatemalan border four days and 21 hours after leaving Costa Rica. It's a small marina but a place where quite a few sail boats stop for storage or repairs when heading north, up into Mexico like us, or south towards Central America and the Panama Canal.

The (not particularly clean) water in the marina was full of life, lots of birds, an abundance of smaller fish, a few turtles and these cute rays:

They are Pacific cownose rays also known as golden cownose rays and often swim around in schools of up to about half a dozen individuals:

In Marina Chiapas, Amanda was put on the hard for storage and Bjarne made a huge cover to shade the boat against UV light and hopefully keep the inside temperature a little lower during summer: