It’s a testament to the fury of the gale we had just passed through that even though the following day was sunny with a mild, fair breeze, we neither shook out the first reef nor flew the big jib. It was enough just to slip along quietly, relieved that it was over while half-dreading another sudden tempest out of a clear sky.
We found the anchorage at Isabella Island deserted when we arrived the following day—several boats that had narrowly survived what must have been the worst night of their lives had limped off to San Blas for repairs, and we had our choice of rocky spots to anchor in. Isabella is notorious for snagging anchors in the boulderfield that is the bottom, so we rigged a tripline to the anchor bail, and I collapsed into a bunk for the first real sleep in thirty hours.
I woke up to find the girls painting rocks and shells in the cockpit, getting as much paint on themselves and the boat as on the rocks. No matter—it had kept them busy while I slept, and washed off pretty easily later. Time to stretch the legs ashore.
Isabella island is an old volcano, long-dormant, its crater filled with stagnant, stinking water. It’s a refuge for frigate birds and boobies, and can be spotted from miles away by the cloud of circling, wheeling fowl above it. The first time I visited it, in 1996, there had been an attempt at pineapple and sugarcane planting, and a fish camp straggled along one beach. By the time we arrived, a bird observatory had been built and abandoned, the pineapples and sugarcane eradicated, and the island given back to the birds and occasional eco-tours. The latter tended to camp in the abandoned observatory, whose roof sheltered them from the otherwise inescapable and prpetual hail of droppings.
We spent a couple of nights there, to rest and hike around the tiny island, sharing the anchorage with creaking, rusty shrimp trawlers who rested there during the day. There’s little to do though, once you’ve explored the whole island, snorkeled in the anchorage, and dug in the sand under the igneous cliff edge, so we wriggled the anchor carefully from among the rocks and headed for San Blas.
For those who don’t mind a slightly rolly anchorage with nothing much ashore but some bug-infested beach palapas, Matachen Bay is a good first mainland stop. There’s a bus into town, and food at the palapas, if you don’t mind sitting in a cloud of coconut-husk smudge pots, trading the ability to breathe for the relief of not getting eaten alive. Those who want better shelter, laundry, and groceries must brave the entrance to the San Blas estuary, where waves usually break across the entrance, and a shifting channel makes local knowledge a must.
For many years, that local knowledge was supplied by Captain Norm. Norm—the “captain” may have been in his own mind—was an ex-cruiser who’d washed up in San Blas to trouble them for their sins. A self-proclaimed guru of local knowledge, Norm punctiliously ran the morning VHF net—even when no one replied for fear of him talking to them—going through a checklist of items worthy of a busy harbor like La Paz: check ins/outs; weather; local interest; current events; services offered or needed; things to sell or trade. Cruisers who didn’t know enough to not reply didn’t do it a second time. If he knew someone was listening, Norm would settle into his mic and air all his grievances, from his dust-ups with local authorities (the coast guard resented his interference), to every cruiser who had done him dirty.
Most cruisers’ first experience of Norm was an urgent call on the VHF as they approached the bar, with a frantic warning that if they didn’t follow his exact instructions, they’d surely run aground and lose the boat. He would guide them in by radio, raising anxiety to fever pitch with his instructions, and causing several near-accidents (did I mention the coast guard?). We were spared the histrionics because we didn’t have the radio on as we approached, and a fisherman in a panga showed us the devious route into the shelter of the breakwalls.
In San Blas the jungle begins in earnest, with all the bugs and humidity one could wish for, and the narrow estuary has room for one row of boats to anchor along one edge, swinging upstream and down twice a day with the tide. It’s neither an unpleasant nor especially remarkable town, but a new government marina had a dinghy dock and laundry (glory!), and there were taco stands in the town square. There was walking to do, and sights to see, and we splurged on a river tour that wound through the jungle in the clearest water. It was not hard to spot turtles and caymans in water that did little to conceal them—all in all it was one of the most satisfactory tours we’ve ever taken.
Norm—who really did mean well, in his own way—turned out, when we met him at the plaza, an enormously fat, unkempt character, sweating through his clothes on a park bench in the shade. I asked him, for the sake of conversation, how far up the river I could take my boat.
“You probably couldn’t get it very far at all,” he puffed. “Let’s just say I could get it a mile or two. But you wouldn’t make it around the first bend.”
I gave it another try: “I mean how far will the river carry a depth of six feet?”
“You’d have to really know what you’re doing,” he said. “Which you don’t.”
I gave it up as a bad job. Talking to Norm had more shoals than a hundred jungle estuaries. Like all the other cruisers, when we upped anchor and left, we did it almost on tiptoe and with the radio off, slipping out at the stand of the tide when there would be the least rowdiness at the entrance bar. Least said, soonest mended, was the motto of everyone who ventured into San Blas in those days.
Once clear of the breakwalls, we pointed Ganymede’s bowsprit south, to begin a series of daysails toward Banderas Bay, where the next decision point waited, and the question of whether to return or proceed further toward the Canal would have to be made.