Ixtapa to Manzanillo, Mexico

by KARIS

June 21, 2022

I am standing in the galley, bracing myself between the two countertops as the swell tosses the boat violently and sporadically from side to side. I am trying to make pasta but the flames on the propane stove keep flickering out. Waves are crashing over the bow, spraying sticky salt water across the front windows and sending the pot sliding across the stove. Every few seconds, the contents of my stomach lurch towards my throat and I am reminded to look up at the horizon and take a few deep breaths. We are 30 hours into our passage, en route to Barra de Navidad. We have been much slower than expected, likely due to the 20 knot winds at our bow, so we have decided to tuck into Manzanillo for the night, get some sleep and finish the last 4 hours of our journey in the morning.

This passage is not all that different from most others…rough and relentless, driving my thoughts into the darker corners of my mind and stirring up regret, doubt and fear. I start to think this was all a mistake. We should be back in our house - the one that doesn’t jerk back and forth and try to bring us to our knees. The kids should be playing in the cul-de-sac with their friends. They should be going to school. They are getting weirder and weirder, talking incessantly about various types of fish and asking a million questions about lightning storms and the big bang and who made humans and how do the tides work and what about swell? My insecurity is disrupted by the lights of Manzanillo coming into view. We squint into the darkness, peering through the binoculars trying to distinguish the difference between the lights of a ship and the ones on the resorts dotting the landscape as we weave our way in between massive freighters to get to the anchorage. We’re the only boat in the anchorage once we get there, and we drop our hook in about 10 meters. Completely drained, we flop into our bed so grateful to finally be still. I think: I’m not doing that again. This is it. There is an airport here. I’ll look up flights in the morning. I can just leave the boat and fly home….

I wake up with the sun the next morning. There is something magical about arriving somewhere in the dark and then waking up and seeing it for the first time in the morning. The resort part of the town is built into the hillsides which slopes toward the ocean. It almost looks like Greece - white stucco apartments tucked into the cliff haphazardly. No two windows or porticos are alike. The sun rises over the further set of hills, casting its rays through the water, illuminating the silvery schools of fish that are darting just below the surface. I am giddy with the excitement of exploring this new town. We only have a couple hours before we need to set sail again. Tropical Storm Celia is on its way up the Pacific coast and we need to get to the marina in Barra before the wind and rain picks up, so we grab our dry bag, lather up in sunscreen and load into the dingy. It is about a 15 minute ride across the bay away from the resorts, towards the more industrial side. As we get closer to the other side, we see 100 or so fishing pangas tied to buoys and piers. We find a cement block near a piece of the shore that looks like a public space - there are stairs down from a little plaza and the sea walls are painted with murals. We offload the kids from the dingy and try to tie it off but the swell proves to be a little stronger than we thought and the dingy scrapes against the shallow, rocky shore and into the sea wall. A nearby fisherman sees us struggling and tells us that we can tie up to his panga nearby, no problemo. He tells Ryan to follow him and leads him in his panga to a mooring buoy where a couple of other boats are tied off. He signals for Ryan to tie off there as well. Much safer, he says. He doesn’t accept the pesos we try to give him as a sign of our gratitude. He just waves us off and heads out on his way. We are so grateful for this stranger's kindness and feel welcome in this foreign town.

The kids posing in front of the iconic sailfish statue in the Manzanillo Harbor. Manzanillo is considered to be the Sailfish capital of the world.

We have a quick breakfast, take a pic in front of the giant sailfish and weave our way through the busy streets to the Market Cinco de Mayo. The market is a two story pavilion packed with the most vibrant, ripe fruits and veggies I’ve ever seen in a long time. There are different “stands'' but they are all so close together it is hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. We buy mangos, dragon fruit, star fruit, grapes, limes, jicama, pineapple, kiwi, melon…as much as the five of us can carry. We skip the meat side but from the 2nd floor can see into the stands selling fresh sausage and whole chickens. If we weren’t in such a hurry we would spend an hour here gawking at all of the gorgeous food.

The Mercado 5 De Mayo in Manzanillo, MX

The dingy is just a 10 minute walk from the market. It is always a good feeling to get back to the dingy and see that it is still where we left it. In this case, it was an even more heartwarming feeling to get back to the dingy and see that the local fishermen had carefully untied it and re-secured it as they maneuvered their own pangas around it. We load it up with the kids and our haul.

Rejuvenated by chilaquiles, the sights and sounds of the market, and good old terra firma, we pull up the anchor and head out on what proves to be a short and sweet motorsail to Barra de Navidad. We stretch out in the sun, enjoy the wind in our faces and wonder at the beauty of the coastline. The regret and doubt from the previous night wash away, and are replaced with curiosity and wonder. This lifestyle is so funny that way. It is almost manic - the lows are so, so low, but the highs that arise from them are so moving. So powerful. I am addicted. I think of Kahil Gibran…your joy is your sorrow unmasked. I remember reading The Prophet for the first time in high school and being so mind blown by the idea that your joy can only run as deep as the space that your grief has carved out. I remember realizing for the first time that I would need to feel all the feelings, not just the pleasant ones, if I wanted to get the most out of my time on earth. Twenty years later, I’m still working on it, but now I wonder if this concept has something to do with why this lifestyle is so satisfying. Many days it feels like we have to wake up and earn our joy. And then, the sea is so much more blue, the sky so much bigger than we ever noticed before.

I am trying to teach the kids (and myself, to be honest) that if you choose to do hard things on purpose, you’ll be prepared to tackle the hard things that life throws at you unexpectedly. Yes - passages suck. We can all agree on that. But when we set foot on land after a treacherous passage, we feel like we have earned that delicious feeling of the sand between our toes. We’ve earned that first bite into a golden mango and the juice that runs down our chins. For one fleeting moment, nothing is taken for granted and we are fully present.