Not an April Fools' Joke

April 1, 2025  

The day before our departure from Tenacatita was a sad day.  We had a great morning in at the beach, which included a beach walk, time playing in the lagoon river, swimming, digging holes, surfing, and running around, all of our beach favourites. 

During it all, however, was the awareness that it was our last day in the bay that had quite happily become our home for the last three months.

That afternoon the pack-up began and Falcon was not shy about voicing his unhappiness with our planned departure.  While we were packing up he repeated “no leave” and “want to come back” many times over. 

Although a part of us felt the same way, we were also looking forward to being back in our house in Canada, and I know that Falcon felt the same way as he often talks fondly about things from there and things that we will be doing when we are back there.   

Unfortunately, our departure will most likely be the demise of many sea animals that have grown up, built their lives and their homes, and lived happily around our boat for the past three months.  Small colourful reef fish that started as just a couple of babies living behind our divers' dream anode on the outside of our hull have now become a whole little school of bigger colourful reef fish that live around our propeller and rudder.  Small crabs that started as just tiny see-through babies grasping to any edge or nook that they could find have grown up to be small 3/4” crabs that live in our thru-hulls, and on the brackets for our folding swim grid.  Each time that we would dive to clean the bottom of our boat we would see, in full the growth, of our resident population.  We had moved anchor spots once during our time here in Tenacatita, but we never increased our speed much, so our following of sea animals was easily able to keep up and happily moved along with us, unfortunately, I expect that that will not be the case when we depart. 

On April 1^st we watched the sun rise over La Manzanilla one last time as we prepared the boat for departure by wiping the dew off of the enclosure windows.  It was funny because in December when we travelled down here we had the full enclosure removed, except for the front window panels and the top, but now in April, when one would expect it to be warmer, we actually had all of the window panels in for the evenings, nights, and mornings, and only opened up as appropriate each day.  With the dew cleaned off of the windows we pulled up our anchor and headed out, and six hours later we were anchored in the north end of Bahia Chamela off of the town of Perula, the same anchorage that we had spent Christmas at.   

When we arrived, our plan was to carry on further north the next morning, which is why we came to the north anchorage, but when we checked the weather that evening there was a good weather window again in a week to allow us to carry on further north.  We made the decision to hope that the weather window in a week would hold and to stay in Bahia Chamela to enjoy it, rather than rushing further north to anchorages that were not likely to be as nice.