A Few More Days in Bahia Chamela

December 27, 2024 

We stayed anchored in the large bay of Chamela for several more days, and we made many trips to the beach. 

With the many Mexican families down on the beach for the holidays Falcon had opportunities to play with some of the children. 

He enjoys seeing other children, and always points and says “kid”.  When he would see one that he wanted to go and play with he would pick up his bucket and shovel and take it over to them, offering it to them as a way to ask if he could play.  Only once did the other child say no, so he had lots of opportunities to play in the sand with other children. 

For two of the nights we moved anchorage over to the large islands in the middle of the bay. 

This was a park area and the island that the panga tours came out to.

We found a lovely beach on Isla Cocinas that did not seem to be frequented by the panga visitors.  We had seen one boat stop there, but the rest seemed to go on to the larger main beach on the island.  We planned a beach day with a picnic, our sunshade, and all of Falcon’s toys, and headed out the next morning. 

It was a beautiful little beach and we set up our sunshade near a tree at the edge of the beach and started to play. 

Soon we all wanted to go into the water, but unfortunately we had not been in the water long when a panga came by and the driver stopped to ask if we had bracelets.  We told him that we have our Mexican park passes, but he told us that that was not enough and that we were not allowed to be on the island without bracelets that could be purchased from town.  We were very disappointed, but we packed up our day camp and headed back to the boat.  After doing some research we found nothing that agreed with this claim, but we also didn’t want to make enemies with the locals, so we respected their claim.  The islands are a park, and we have park passes that should have allowed us to visit, but perhaps there was some other information that we did not know.  In speaking with other cruisers, it seems that others had also been told that they could not visit the island as of this year.

The next morning we moved back over to the area of the town.  On our way over we saw a mom humpback whale and her calf swimming along the shoreline further in the bay.