Bahia Tenacatita is a bay just North of Manzanillo Mexico. It’s an interesting place. There are a few areas to anchor and we are in the main anchorage. There’s a little cruiser community here and everyone checks-in on the VHF in the morning. There’s almost nothing here other than a beautiful beach and La Vena, a palapa restaurant that’s closed on Tuesdays and closes at sunset. Cruisers come here and stay for MONTHS. There’s no stores and no town. Barra de Navidad (with lots of services) is about 15NM away so it’s possible to do a long day trip by sailboat to pick up necessities.
Since there is no town and only a beach its a quiet place to hang out in the sun and cool off in the clear ocean water. Clearly the cruisers here agree. The cruisers often play bocce ball in the afternoon and have bonfires on the beach at night. But, there’s also one other thing that only the adventurous are willing to do and that is the local jungle cruise. This is a self-guided tour through the mangroves. (Yes I said “Self-Guided”). Who would want to guide themselves through the jungle?
We decided we’d give it a try and if it didn’t work out for some reason we could always turn around. We left in the morning and got the dinghy through the surf and past the sandbar at the entrance to the estuary. We’d been told that whenever there is a fork in the estuary, stay left. We set out and immediately had to get out and wade the dinghy over a sandbar but then the channel seemed to deepen and continue. We cruised, and cruised, and cruised, for at least a couple of miles. At points the mangroves completely closed over us and we were enclosed in a mangrove tunnel. We were hoping critters didn’t fall out of the trees on to our heads. Clearly the channel was maintained. We could see where roots and branches had been trimmed back. We saw lots of birds, great blue herons (dozens), snowy egrets (dozens), red crabs living in the mangrove roots, fish jumping in front of us, and even more channel ahead. We were on the lookout at all times for crocodiles. It seemed like we were going forever. Had we not been advised that there was a beautiful beach on the other side we certainly would have turned back.
Finally, we got to a big fork with a wide channel heading off right and a MUCH narrower one heading left. We went left. At another point a panga was headed the other way much faster than us, everyone slowed down and made the one-way boat channel a two-way channel to get by each other. We had to move over so far we were being whipped in the head by the mangroves. We met one other dingy coming back and they told us it wasn’t too much further. At this point we were occasionally needing to duck our heads to stay out of low hanging mangrove branches. Finally, we came to the lagoon and could see the small beach to tie the dinghy up and walk over to the ocean beach.
We were greeted by a string of palapa restaurants and spent the day on the beach with some cruiser friends that had made the same trip we had. All in all a very adventurous day and we made it back to the boat safely before sunset.
Tomorrow may be a snorkeling day. There’s a rocky point here called “The Aquarium” because it’s such a good place to snorkel, swim and look at the coral reef and fish living there. This coral reef is described as the most interesting live coral reef on the West coast of Mexico. Looking forward to another exciting day.
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