Guaymas

Approach to Guaymas harbor.

ON THE MORNING THAT ANNA ARRIVED at the southwest hook of Isla Pajaros - the entrance island off the mouth of Guaymas harbor - after crossing the pristine, northern Sea of Cortez the air was fresh, and the water somewhat opaque; particulate matter in the water scattered the light and visibility under the surface was reduced. Still, for a major industrial harbor, the water and air quality were reasonable - by Mexico standards. That would change, profoundly, by the following morning as the wind direction and an accidental commercial fish boat spill combined forces to form what could only be described as: stunning toxicity.

Ptomaine fumes, and industrial chemicals from nearby smokestacks released prodigious amounts of gas into the atmosphere. The senses quickly become overwhelmed. Eyes burn, breathing through the mouth scorches the throat, and breathing through the nose becomes increasingly intolerable, pungent, beyond all reason. Yet despite the sensory assault, Guaymas harbor remained appealing; admittedly, not for everyone.

The approach from sea is visually dramatic, revealing nothing of what lay hidden around the bend. The harbor is surrounded by rugged mountain peaks. Forests of 40-foot cactus cover the islands and islets that are dispersed within the boundaries of the harbor. Pelicans dive bomb for unsuspecting bait fish that leap out of the scintillated waters prior to dusk. Busy panga fishermen set their nets in the outer harbor. Commercial shrimpers and fish boats and work boats and grain ships and oil tankers come and go, at all hours. The lights from the industrial docks twinkle at night. Small, brightly-colored, working-class homes spiral up the surrounding peaks that overlook the city and harborscape. There is a constant buzz of white noise and activity emanating from nearby coves, where the commercial fish boats tie up and offload. The steel-gray navy boats and their marines, moored adjacent to the malecon, are always vigilant, they take their jobs seriously and add a good measure of safety, both within the harbor and along the stretch of coast they patrol.

Dangerous cargo entering the port of Guaymas.

On a good day, at our outer anchorage, located exactly three miles as the crow flies from the Guaymas public docks - the gateway and access point to downtown and the public mercado - we enjoy the sea breeze, without the motion of the waves to disturb Anna's hull. From our little nook, behind the hook on the southwest side of Isla Pajaros we can see the tall, twin spirals of the old church in the town square, and the fleet of old rusting fish boats, and the grain terminal, and the red-and-white radio towers, and the big ships (400-600 feet in length) anchored out in the bahia, just to our west. With a southeast wind the sea breeze, off Anna's bow, is refreshing, especially with the air temperature approaching 100 degrees F. In May and June, while the humidity is still relatively low, the temperature is bearable. But July and August promise a world of hurt. Temperatures hover over a hundred, occasionally reaching 110-120 degrees F. Add high humidity at that time of year, and life is brutal during the sunny, daytime hours. Not much better at night.

Guaymas architecture, layered, through the years.

We tend to gravitate toward anchorages that are either remote, where other boats and people are seldom seen - pristine places, way off the beaten path - or, when we have the chance, toward the commercial-industrial complex of gritty, city harbors, not unlike Guaymas; generally,  places not known as destinations.

On the inconvenient outskirts of Guaymas harbor where we initially moored, other boats entering the harbor tended to pass us by, as if Anna and her anchorage were invisible, as if we were somehow under their radar. Admittedly, that is part of what we look for when selecting an anchorage: a quiet, anonymous, non destination. The other part of what we look for, ideally, is a bottom with good holding power for our spade anchor, and some protection from wave chop and wrap-around swell. We don't mind the wind so much, it keeps the energy coming in, alongside the solar arrays.

Resurreccion II and Jesus Albierto III.

On a not-so-good day, to the east of Guaymas' outer harbor, the wind may flip to westerly. In this scenario, the most objectionable, foul, poisonous, unfit-for-human-life toxins move directly east, and into our little, invisible hook on the southwest quadrant of Isla Pajaros.

Navy yard with cargo ships in backdrop.

We've driven past the New Jersey turnpike's industrial complex, near Newark airport; and anchored directly downwind of a Pacific Northwest pulp mill; sailed, rather slowly, through extensive patches of fishy, fishy seas off the Pacific coasts of N. America; we've moored close by and downwind of a large herd of basking sea lions; driven past mounds of pungent cow manure, and burning rubber piles, off I-5, near Fresno, CA; we've docked downwind of a fish-processing plant, in SE Alaska; and we've had to wear serious, industrial-strength gas masks, while applying coats of noxious Hypalon to the hulls of sea-kayaks we've built. We thought we knew what bad air smelled like, tasted like, burned like. We thought we understood the side effects of toxic air: headaches, burning, dizziness.

Fishing fleet.

Turns out, we didn't know a damned thing, until the winds came out of the west, from Guaymas harbor, one steamy-hot day behind the little hook, at the southwest corner of Isla Pajaros.  It made the Jersey pike smell like an air freshener, by comparison.

And after a few days of this miserable business of wafting winds, out of the wrong direction, we decided to take the long ride into town to see what was what, on the other side of the cactus-covered hill. We lowered ourselves into our little inflatable, the mighty Merc, with its 2-hp Honda outboard attached, and buzzed over to the public dock, off downtown Guaymas. It was three nautical miles and it took us 40 minutes, one way across the bay. We buzzed along at a speed of about 4 knots. Slow, but we weren't in a hurry. We were on a fact-finding tour - reconnoitering. We passed navy ships, tankers, pangas, and assorted commercial fishing craft along the way. And, we noticed a few dead fish here and there. Probably spillover from the processing plants nearby, or so we thought. And then we passed the processing plants and the carnage kept on increasing until finally, within a half-mile of the Guaymas docks, we found ourselves dodging thousands of small, silver bait fish, belly up. Surreal. A navy boat was moored in the inner harbor and it was completely enveloped by dead fish. One could almost envision walking across this field of silver, to get from the ship to the navy base a couple hundred yards away.

Sonora prepares to let go the lines.

Meanwhile, along the shoreline, steam wafted up from the stacks at the nearby industrial plants. Upwind, from the littered, silver sea. On land, semis downshifted and backfired past the industrial plants as they worked their way along the winding hills, on their approach to Guaymas centro. We tied-up the dinghy at the dock and went for a walk through town. The air currents within the harbor district appeared to take a detour around the central district and left the residents of Guaymas in relative, discordant peace. It's been a while since we've been in a large, industrial, working-class port.

Anna at fuel dock.

Guaymas has a real-feel about it, much less touristy than La Paz, by comparison. And nothing at all like Cabo San Lucas or San Jose del Cabo or Mazatlan or Puerto Vallarta. Guaymas is connected to the rest of the world in ways that very small, dusty villages or towns on the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez, are not. But it hasn't lost any of it's character along the way. Very little English is spoken in Guaymas. The people here haven't had a lot of exposure to foreigners, and so when trying to converse with someone, if you start asking them questions in Spanish, they assume that you are somewhat fluent and rapid-fire their answers back, in Spanish. Asking them to speak more slowly and clearly does not change anything. Rapid-fire Espanol is what you get. Nevertheless, it's all very friendly. And we all manage to figure it out somehow.

Navy dock, Guaymas harbor.

We sucked down a couple of cold beers (a luxury, as we don't refrigerate, on board) at a nearby restaurant. It was in the mid 90's, on the shady side of the street. The beer tasted really fine. Had a hamburgesa for a change of pace. The beef was excellent. Guaymas is in the state of Sonora. And Sonoran beef is considered similar to Kobe beef, in quality. We've had both, and don't disagree. But when all is said and done, the beef in Salinas, CA takes the blue ribbon.

Tiered housing, Guaymas.

We had enough for one hot, odoriferous day and headed back to Anna, some 40 minutes away. We returned the way we came in, across the silver sea of dead fish. Eventually, the wind died down and the air seemed less objectionable than earlier in the day. The fumes would come and go. The pelicans were out for their late afternoon catch, some were dive-bombing from 80 feet up, crashing head first into the water to snatch their targets from just under the surface. Others were skimming, in low formation, military-style, in-sync, occasionally breaking formation to slam into the surface of the water with their long, powerful beaks; they never came up empty-handed. Not once did we see a seabird, of any kind, go after any of the fish floating dead at the surface. Easy pickings for a scavenger. But even a lazy scavenger is smarter than that.

We've been anchored out at Isla Pajaros, on the perimeter of Guaymas harbor for a week now. It's both horrifying and exquisite. We're repelled, but somehow can't turn away. But we also wanted to try anchoring-out off the malecon, where we could conveniently dinghy-in to pick up a few supplies, at the supermercado.

After a week at the outer anchorage we dropped the hook just off the downtown Guaymas waterfront. In the thick of it. The air quality and water quality had improved significantly since we came in a few days prior. The dead fish were all gone. Turns out that a fish boat spilled their hold into the harbor. Maybe it was an accident, maybe not. No one seems to know or care. The air quality was also much improved. The fish processing docks are over the mountain, in the coves of the outer harbor, so the effects of wafting air, along the Guaymas waterfront are substantially lessened, tolerable.

Twin towers, Guaymas style.

Guaymas is an attractive city, in an attractive setting. That is, attractive in a gritty sort of way. Real. Vibrant. No facades. It is what it is. And that is precisely what we love about it.

We took a local bus ride - the local bus is known as a collectivo - to San Carlos, about 15 miles away. The cost was 12 pesos. We wanted to see what San Carlos was all about. San Carlos is a gringo community (250 miles from the US border at Nogales, just south of Tucson, AZ). As the bus approached San Carlos, the dusty air cleared, the roads became smooth blacktop, with occasional landscaped, red cobble-stoned turnarounds near the start of the condo communities. The billboards switched to English, big houses populated the gated communities along the white-sand beaches. The hilltops overlooking the Sea were tiered with fashionable villas, the largest at the top of the hill, with a view to the sea; in Guaymas, the view homes at the top of the mountains are smaller and more run down, it takes more of an effort to reach them, on foot, as there may not be a drivable road to reach them. In San Carlos, the roads were smooth and wound their way up to the tops of the hillsides - easy access. We passed a country club, manicured landscapes, and palapa-style restaurants (a gringo's idea of what a quaint, Mexican bar and grill along the beachfront should look like). And 4WD-ATVs, apparently, were the gringo vehicle of choice for tooling around the neighborhood, to and from the palapas, even though the roads were blacktopped. Mexicans spoke English in San Carlos, and very well indeed, to accomodate, no doubt, the many needs of the needy baby-boomers, the ex-pat community, developed over the course of time, in once-upon-a-time, dusty, charming, San Carlos.

Well, we'd had enough of that after a couple hours and flagged down the first, rusty, gear-grinding hulk of a bus, the collectivo, bound for Guaymas; a world and 12 pesos apart, yet only 15 miles to the south and east. The bus driver's front windshield was spider-web cracked and spot welded with lead. It was remarkable, not so much because in the U.S. such a vechicle would be yanked off the road, by the state police, as soon as it was spotted, but because the driver appeared to be looking out of a small, rectangular slot in the windshield, about 6-inches wide by 4-inches high just to the left of center, below the rear view mirror, where the glass wasn't shattered - the size of the opening in an armored tank. This was his view to the world in front of him. He grinded the gears on his bus, probably for 12-16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, over dusty roads and cobblestones and highways and bumpy city streets. A replacement windshield, any time soon, was not really an economic option.

We got off the collectivo at the supermercado in Guaymas, filled up a shopping basket worth of non-refrigerated odds and ends, loaded them into a run-down taxi and returned to the docks where we left our dinghy. We loaded the goods and proceeded on back to Anna as the wind began to pipe up. The one-foot chop sent some spray over the bow and we got sprinkled along the way, but when the temperature hits the high 90s, a little bit of spray is welcome.

Fish fleet and wreck.

At night, when the sun goes down the malecon comes alive with all sorts of loud, electrified music, all of which compete with each other for decibel levels, dominance. Water fountains spray colorfully illuminated plumes high into the air, in sync with the music. The local population descends on the malecon after sunset; they stroll and dance and even exercises to Zumba rhythms, along the seaside esplanade, working off the effects of the irresistible, sugary churros and copious amounts of Coca Light or Tecate or Pacifico or Dos XX or Bohemia consumed during the blazing sunny hours of the day. Coca Light is a national pastime.

Out on Anna's forward deck, we have dinner, a couple of lukewarm beers, and watch and listen to the goings-on from about 8 p.m. until about 10 p.m. And then suddenly, it all stops. The people go home and get some sleep, before getting up for work or school, next morning. Next evening the scene is repeated, once again. We love Guaymas.

p.s. Hurricane season has just begun here, on the Pacific side of Mexico. Bud is the first arrival of the season. We anticipate returning to La Paz, by August. There are four relatively safe havens from hurricanes in the Sea of Cortez, some better than others depending on the hurricane's path of travel. Guaymas, where we are currently located, has good protection, as does Bahia Don Juan, in the Islas de Los Angeles group, on the Baja side. Puerto Escondito has protection, but depends significantly on the path of the hurricane. La Paz had two good hurricane holes, one is Pichilingue commercial harbor, and the other is Costa Baja Marina's inner harbor - man made, by blasting out of the surrounding mountains, a protective basin. We will keep within a day or two of these four locations as we return to La Paz, over the next couple of months. Once we return to La Paz we plan to complete some work on the boat that we've been planning. We have designed a marine-grade aluminum, hard dodger to take the place of our canvas dodger, which is now 20-years old. More on the specifics of the design, later.

p.p.s. Our package, sent to the U.S., by DHL 3-day express service, finally cleared through Mexican and U.S. customs and reached its destination in Minneapolis, MN. It took 14 days. Not bad, considering the extraordinary, official and unofficial red tape required when sending or receiving packages other than flat mail, in or out of Mexico. We're resting up in anticipation of all the effort that will undoubtedly be needed to get the part that we sent out for repair, returned to us via DHL, passing through U.S. and Mexican customs, yet one more tedious time.