When we move to a new anchorage we never know what to expect. Zihuatanejo (Zihua) is no different. Zihua is a resort city on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, northwest of Acapulco. It’s known for its beaches, like the sweeping Playa La Ropa, which is backed by palm trees. Galleries and seafood restaurants line the city’s winding lanes. We’d come here to attend The 20th Annual Zihuatanejo International Guitar Festival with fellow cruisers. We anchored in a fairly crowded harbor with lots of water taxis zooming around, and a large number of sailboats. From the moment we arrived Zihua has been a nice surprise. There’s a beautiful malecón with good restaurants, fun bar, interesting Mexican shops and friendly people.
Zihua is a reasonably big city so there are services available that are often hard to find. This is welcome security for cruisers who (like us) are often cruising with one or more things broken on the boat. There are beautiful beaches in Zihua and the dinghy landing beach near the public pier is unique. It’s a reasonably protected beach for dinghy landing with the lowest surf in the bay. Often Mateo is standing at the beach to assist hauling dinghies up the beach to a ‘parking area’ for a tip and even washes the sand off the girls’ feet. Often there was a bucket of water ready to rinse off your feet after the trip through the sand with wet feet. This is helpful with a dinghy that may have several people in it and all the other things that it gets used for (laundry, groceries, dogs, gas jugs, etc.).
When we came back late at night to pick up the dinghy from the beach to go back to the boat, someone was often still there waiting to help get the dinghy back out through the surf line. Although we have occasionally heard of petty theft from dinghies and boats and theft of dinghy or motors elsewhere in Mexico we saw absolutely no sign of this in Zihua. In fact, here many cruisers left their dinghies tied to their boat floating overnight. This would have been a very risky strategy in other places (like La Cruz de Huanacaxtle near Puerto Vallarta).
Along with Rob and Dawn from SV Salt Whistle, we were scheduled to meet friends from SV Felicita (Tim and Gretchen https://gntsailing.com/ ) and attend the opening concert on the pier featuring all the artists attending the guitar festival. This gives everyone a chance to sample the different music styles and decide who you’d like to hear more of when they are featured at one of the nightly ‘gala dinners’. Practically, we needed reservations for the venues, so we had some pre-planned events to go to. We spent the eight days of guitar fest hearing some fantastic guitar music and eating great food. By the end of the week we were overloaded on guitar and dining out. We’d heard some excellent guitar music from up and coming and established artists. Since we can’t possibly do a satisfactory description of all the acts that we saw, we’ll just provide a link to the event. https://www.zihuafest.com/program/ During the day we explored Zihua. There are lots of shops and restaurants around town from very authentic Mexican, to American style hamburgers and pasta made by Italian expats. One of our favorite spots is a microscopic bar on the corner of calle Vincente Guerrero and calle Nicholas Bravo. No matter when we walked by there was a crowd and a cold Corona available, and an EXCELLENT chance of running into someone that we knew there. Shopping ranged from the Mercado Centro, a very traditional market with everything available to a Soriana, a very western style supermercado (supermarket). During our stay we received news that a sailing vessel we have shared anchorages with (but don’t know directly) was lost during a bar crossing in Bahia del Sol in El Salvador. Happily there was no loss of life, unhappily a cruising vessel was a total loss. Here’s a link to a discussion about SV Rum Truffle https://www.trawlerforum.com/forums/s36/loss-sv-rum-truffle-bahia-del-sol-bar-el-salvador-71359.html. Our thoughts are with Mark, the skipper of SV Rum Truffle and we’re reminded that this activity we pursue is not without risks.
We will plan to leave Zihua soon. As we always say, “our plans are written in the sand at low tide!”
Leave a Reply