Mazatlan Anchorage

Mazatlan is about 160 nautical miles from Banderas Bay (Puerto Vallarta). We can go 6.0 knots so the trip is more than 24 hours. We mostly motored for the next day and overnite and arrived in Mazatlan with a familiar feeling of being somewhere brand new. We anchored in the main port area near the “old town’, and the ferry terminals. We were soon treated with a close view of the arrival of some large cruise ships. It was quite entertaining. Cruise ships come in the morning and leave in the evening. So I guess you would get to choose one activity to experience in Mazatlan if you were on a cruise ship.

The anchorage described by the guidebook is at a place called Club Nautico, a cruisers destination that has mostly been replaced by large marinas 8-miles North. Apparently at some point a hurricane also took out the restaurant and Club Nautico (cruiser’s club) so there is really not much there other than ruins, a minimal bathroom, a decaying dinghy dock and a security guard at a gate. Good enough to anchor but not glitzy at all. The security guard takes care of 20 cats on the property. There are also a few friendly dogs that wander around. There’s apparently no charge to use the dinghy dock but we tipped the guard every day to let us in and out of the locked gate. (I never figued out what they were guarding other than our dinghy at the dock but we had it locked up anyway). We spent our first day trying to get checked in with the Port Captain (unsucessfully) and then walked on the Malecon along the water. Mazatlan has a very long Malecon and we walked from one end to the other (over 4 miles). I don’t know what the translation of Malecon is,but ‘promenade’ is probably close. It’s a wide walkway with statues and sculptures, restaurants and shops. There are beach palapa restaurants, food carts, hotels, fishermen and families walking and sun-bathing on the beach. At the far end of the Malecon are the MAZATLAN letters where we had lunch, found a grocery store and took an Uber back to the boat. A cruiser friend told us not to miss three things in Mazatlan. Old town, The Observatario, and El Faro. Happily, although Club Nautico is not ‘deluxe’, it’s quite close to all three. The Mazatlan public market is huge with trinkets, fruiterias, carnicerias, panaderias (vegetable shops, butchers, and bakeries). Being on a boat with limited space we saw lots of cool stuff but managed to just look. The walk to the market took us through Old Town and the town square, a beautiful garden area surrounded by shops and restaurants with lit-up flamingo sculptures in the middle. We also walked past the Mazatlan Cathedral, a huge beautiful basilica. The Observatario is a nineteenth century building with a view of the entire Mazatlan coast. It was used as a lookout for approaching ships. Since then the grounds have been converted into a beautiful park with peacocks, an aviary, an iguana preserve and even a couple of giant tortoises. There’s a funicular railway up and a sky bar at the top. Although my descriptions are short, I can’t speak highly enough of the place. It is just beautiful and peaceful up there. It looks like it is also used as an event venue and it would be lovely. There is also construction to add a whale museum in the future. El Faro is the Mazatlan Lighthouse (literally El Faro means Lighthouse in Spanish). Possibly the highest one on the Mexican Pacific Coast. There’s a hike to the top that we could access with a very short walk from Club Nautico. We were treated to a vantage point that actually looked down on the Observatario in the distance. For a small fee we also could walk out on a glass floored walkway over the edge of the cliff that the lighthouse is built on. The walk up was only a couple of kilometers with about 300 stairs in the last half. From the top we could look down on the anchorage and see Island Summers waiting for us to return. On our last day in Mazatlan we moved to Marina Mazatlan, had dinner with cruiser friends Charlie and Wendy and listened to the late evening celebrations before Easter Sunday when we began our 2-day trip back to Banderas Bay.

On our return back we experienced yet another panga boat fishing with a long line that we had to navigate around. The line would be more visible to cruisers if the fisherman used something other than small clear coke bottles for floats. After floating awhile they fill with sea water and float under the surface. We had to come to a stop, reverse, and figure out how to navigate around them. While doing so, we spotted a turtle with a little sea bird hitching a ride on the turtles shell. Sometimes its a blessing to slow down and enjoy the finer things in life.