SailingKnitter

As anyone who has lived near the sea knows, the level of the high and low tides can be widely variable. Recently we had a new moon and the tides were wild! Check out the photo of the water taxi dock with Jonesy's feet in the panga with our groceries...the end of the dock is high and dry!!

There is only a narrow channel as the entrance to the lagoon where we all anchor (for free!) and we've had several sailboats run aground while motoring in to anchor. No biggie - dingy's zoom out to help tug the new arrivals off of the sandbars and guide them back to the channel and out to the anchorage.

Here's a photo of how narrow the entrance is at these super low tides - that's the gap at the far right side of the photo - the megayacht is at the end-tie in the marina and you can barely see us sailboats way out in the lagoon. See all the shallow shoals???

How deep is it? Well, usually the channel is about 12 feet deep, but because it is narrow and unmarked, it is really easy to stray over to the sandy shoals. So why do we bother? Because anchoring is FREE and the town of Barra de Navidad is marvelously Mexican.

Of course the water depth in the anchorage also declines with these low tides and we've had some boats gently tap & ride the bottom. At one point we had only 6 inches of water under our keel on Niki wiki!!! But we were still floating so no biggie! Here's a picture we took yesterday of Niki Wiki anchored in the lagoon.

As this is the week between Christmas and New Year's the town is really crowded with Mexican tourists - mostly families. The surf was calm, the water is warm and everyone is partying like there's no tomorrow. We went for a walk over in the small lagoon village of Colimilla and came across these "sleeping policmen" in the road. These are some hairy speed bumps!!! At least these are well-marked - there are some pretty scary speed bumps on the roads in Mexico and many are not marked (anymore - once were, but the paint wore off).

On the KNITTING FRONT: I've started writing up some little patterns for my knitting guild for 7 x 7" squares for our Lap Robes for the Veterans Administration Hospital. I didn't have any acrylic worsted weight yarn in my stash, but actually found some in a little stationary/school supplies store in Barra. Now I can knit up the squares and have a full 12 different designs to make up a complete lap robe for the guild.

Jonesy is hungry - gotta go round up some grub for him....