When Kirstyn asked Chewy if he was sure he had the time to drive us around doing our chores, he said he was “solo” lots of time. He told us a hundred pesos and didn’t put any limit on what we got for that hundred pesos. In the morning he took us to get propane and diesel and ice. But first he needed to get bait, so we drove to a fish processing plant somewhere in the hinterlands of mazatlan. Big tunas all over the floor and a guy filleting the big fish. Chewy filled plastic bins with the trimmings. Apparently the trimmings are popular because we needed to wait for him to cut up a bunch of fish before we could fill Chewy’s bins. The best chunks of tuna were being run through a big smoker. Chewy grabbed a big chunk of smoked tuna and offered me a bite. It was pretty damn good. We ended up getting all our chores done and Chewy seemed really happy when Kirstyn gave him $150 pesos and a six pack. The first time we met him, we were told he was the guy who could help us purchase our bottom paint. Chewy has a storage locker at Club Nautico, the place where us boat folks can tie up our dinghies in Mazatlan’s commercial harbour. He seems to hang out there a lot and may possibly even live in the storage locker full of fishing gear and half full cans of paint. Since we met Chewy, he’s stopped and said hello every time we pass. Sometimes we’d be walking into town and he’d be driving by. Sometimes he’d stop by our boat in his panga when he’s heading out fishing. On the morning of our planned departure from Mazatlan, our anchor wouldn’t come up. More accurately, our chain was snagged on something and wouldn’t budge. We motored this way and that for the better part of an hour and the thing wouldn’t let go. That’s when Chewy showed up. He was in his wetsuit and had his dive compressor in the boat. He sized up our situation and promised he’d fix it mas tarde, in the afternoon, and off to work he went. That afternoon Chewy spent over an hour unwinding our anchor chain from not one but two anchors that had been abandoned down there. He tied a line around one of them and told us he’d be retrieving them later. Chewy never asked for payment and looked surprised when I handed him a handful of pesos. He just smiled and told us to have a safe journey. Cheers to Chewy, and if you’re in Mazatlan, stop by and say hello, he’s a kind man and he drinks Pacifico.
San Blas! It’s a Blas from the pass. We’re having a Blas in San Blas. Jesus H Chris I Blaspheme from San Blas. Too much? It’s a standard tropical paradise here in San Blas, complete with palm tree beaches and crocodile infested mangrove estuaries. We cruised one such crocodile estuary, complete with a stop at a crocodillery, or crocodile zoo with deer, jaguar, lynx, parrots and… wait for it… a shit ton of sleepy crocodiles. They wanted to eat us. I stared into their eyes, they looked at me the same way I look at a pig or a tuna. Snacks. But steel fences allow us to get great pictures without being eaten. There was also a warm fresh water spring swimming hole complete with English speaking bartender and a fence to keep out the man eating crocodiles. A veritable paradise as long as you got bug spray. And it’s all a short panga ride from town. The panga ride itself was a highlight. If you don’t know these vessels, they were developed by the world bank back in the seventies to provide safe fishing boats for fishermen in developing countries. These days they’re a common site in a lot of countries, Mexico included. A river safari in a sturdy boat past turtles and crocodiles, through mangroves until the water turns fresh and then tropical jungle. Let me take a break for a moment and comment on the Trudeau family in their Indian outfits. Jesus Christ, if I wore a sombrero and a handlebar moustache I’d probably get hung by a bridge upside down by my nuts. Douchebag. Anyway, he may not be smart but at least he’s not the last guy. That’s the last time I’ll get political for awhile. Bahia Matanchen is where we’re anchored, a few miles south of San Blas. It’s a slightly rolly anchorage, but so what, beggars can’t be choosers and it’s free and has character. We met a couple nice ladies on the boat, one from here but now living in Ventura county and the other from the Dominican Republic but living in Boston. And a couple from some place in Sinaloa with a small child. We all went for lunch at the beach after and drank a cooler full of beer. I had lobster, grilled fish and ceviche. Kirstyn had beer and banana loaf purchased from a beach vendor. Fresh beach banana loaf. Muy bien! The tropical jungle is nice. The desert was great for hiking, due to the lack of thick vegetation blocking your path, but jungle seems a little more exotic. I can fend off jaguars and crocodiles if I need to, we have plastic oars in the tiny boat. It’s amazing the change a few hundred miles makes. On the morning we came into San Blas, we were surrounded by what felt, and may well have been hundreds of whales. I saw at least ten breaches in a couple hours. The only time I’ve seen more whales was in Jaun de Fuca Straits a couple years ago when we had humpbacks around us for three or four hours. I’m not up on my whales even though I’ve been listening to Moby Dick on audio book, but when I’ve seen humpbacks in Canada they come up and breathe a bunch of times then you see flukes and they’re gone. These whales were slapping the water with their tails and side fins and hanging out on the surface for a long time. Good thing I’m not a harpooneer, although if I’d been born a hundred and fifty years earlier I think I may have made a decent whaler. Sorry sis, I’ll never be a vegan. I do feel a thrill when I see a whale blow in the distance and could imagine the hunt. Stabbing a leviathan from a small boat probably ain’t for most. The idea of making a living without seeing land for three years and brawling with nature’s most formidable creatures seems strangely appealing, although I don’t see myself as an offshore sailor. I’ve never got a thrill out of hauling a salmon into the boat, irregardless of its size, it’s just dinner and can’t strike back, but a whale could. I’ve taken to the Mexican way of fishing with a hand line with a rubber bungee. Drag the fish till it dies then pull it in for dinner. There’s no reason to use a rod, I’m hungry not a sportsman. Sportsmanship is for football players, I’m just a sailor with a limited supply of fresh stuff aboard. So we’re firmly in the tropics. Apart from the odd hurricane, squall or lightning strike, we’ve left the nastiness of the North Pacific behind us. The open roadstead anchorages seem a little less threatening than when we were coming down the Pacific coast of the Baja, I don’t find myself fretting over charts trying to figure out where we’ll run if a nasty bit of weather comes along. This is it, tuck behind some little point and ride out the weather. Some day we’ll probably decide to bring the boat back to Canada, and then we… or at least I will have no choice but to become a real sailor. So far we’ve ran downwind in a bunch of hops, but no real test. If we come back to Canada, I’ll have to spend a significant time in the North Pacific of the North Atlantic. Until then I’ll bravely face the tropical breeze and work on my tan. Someone recently told me they paid $2500 US to transit the Panama Canal in their sailboat. I briefly imagined myself sailing around Cape Horn. Then I imagined myself motoring through Magellan’s Straits. Then I imagined myself paying a bunch of money to take the shortest route to the Caribbean. That’s why I’ll be getting a job soon. Not that I’m giving any hints as to our plans, we really haven’t thought that far ahead. We really haven’t decided where to go next. As I see it we’ve got a few options. We could continue south next season toward Central American or we could base ourselves in Mexico and tour inland. Eventually we’ll need to decide if we’re going east through the canal, west across the Pacific, north back to British Columbia or south to the continent below us. We’ve spent a lot less money since we’ve been in Mexico than we would have if we’ve been in Canada, that’s reassuring, but if we’re to continue on this journey, we’ll need to be more frugal than we have been or spend more time labouring for the cash required to maintain our lavish lifestyle. Groceries are cheap here. The big expenditures are boat stuff, anything imported seems to be expensive here.
The con man.
When I was a young fellow, I worked at a seafood wholesale company. As many people have said over the years, anyone who’s successful in the fish business is most likely a little crooked or an all out con man. At the fish company, the employees were given the opportunity to invest in the lucrative business. We were shown statements showing great profits and told that we’d be crazy not to get a piece of the action. The money that was being raised was used in a separate venture that the gentlemen was planning. His other venture was clam seed production. If you’re thinking clam seed?!? Clams have seeds, like carrots? No, aquaculture participants call themselves farmers and therefore need to plant crops. Clam farmers lease beaches from the federal government, then seed the beach with thousands of tiny baby clams a fraction of the size of your pinky fingernail, then when the clams are all grown up, they hire Vietnamese clam diggers to harvest the product. That’s how you get chowder. The gentleman I’m talking about, planned on being the only supplier of tiny baby clams in Britain Columbia. He purchased an old fish farm and a very expensive system to grow sea algae which is the preferred food of tiny baby clams. Unfortunately he overestimated the market for tiny baby clams. I mean, how many clam farmers do you know? Unless you live on Cortez or Denman Island, probably not many. So, as time went on, the gentleman sucked every penny he could out of the seafood company and any thoughts of profits his employees had were long gone. Eventually the seafood company ceased to exist. But a true con man doesn’t give up that easily. If nobody wants the product you’re selling, maybe you got the wrong product, or maybe you just need a better sales pitch. Like in journalism, every good news story has an angle, every good sales pitch also needs an angle, unless you’re selling something everyone needs, but obviously he wasn’t. Around the time that everything was at its most dire for the gentlemen, he caught cancer. I know what you’re thinking, cancer isn’t like a cold, you don’t catch it and it can’t be cured by taking lots of vitamin-c. But I believe this gentlemen did catch cancer, and not only that, he did what the greatest minds in medical science have thus far failed to do. He cured cancer. His cancer didn’t go into remission, he didn’t have a tumour cut out and he didn’t get radiation treatment. He ate the sea algae meant for the tiny baby clams and it cured his cancer. How did he know the algae would cure him?!? Have you ever heard of a clam getting cancer? So there you have it, that’s how the legend of the cancer curing algae was born. But the important lesson of the story, is that if you ever find yourself in a desperate situation, one so dire that there seems to be no way out, cancer victims are more desperate than you and will probably buy your product, even if your product is green slime. I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone who’s purchased his algae pills, but among those of us who invested in his business, I don’t remember anyone calling him out. I don’t remember anyone actually asking him if he scammed us. It’s a peculiar thing that when someone gets taken by a financial scam, they never want to admit it. Even amongst those of us that worked there, I don’t recall anyone saying “damn, we really shouldn’t have trusted that guy.” I think some of them even continued to defend him years later. I invested what I now consider to be a small sum, a reasonable price for an important life lesson. Some of my coworkers mortgaged their homes, yet they still continued working there and even treated him like he was some sort of respectable business man. Of course it’s embarrassing to get scammed, but a con man desires respect like anyone else. He only continues to scam because nobody calls him a crook to his face. So call them out, to their face and in public. So why am I writing about this? Because Sometimes when I think of something, even something that happened years ago, I sleep better if I write it down. And if I’m going to write something down, I may as well let you read it. I also think it’s a great story, which is something I value above most other things and the moral of the story at the end gives it an 80’s sitcom feel.
Adventures of Sunshine Three 