Puerto Aventuras to Isla Mujeres - May 28-30

Time to turn North.......we have gone as far south as we wanted to go on this trip.  Fighting the gulf stream was taking a little longer than we had anticipated, but it was worth it.  For our return, our plan is to head back to Isla Mujeres, via either the anchorage known as "The Hut" or via Puerto Morales again, then stay in Isla awaiting the arrival of another friend Patrick from Atlanta.  From Isla, we hope to head for Cuba. So stay posted, for updates as we don't anticipate much in the way of internet once we get there.

We sailed north with the benefit of the stream, but did have winds with a significant north component (i.e., on our nose).  Seas were somewhat rough with the wind counter to the current.  We tacked out towards Cozumel and sailed almost 2/3 of the way to Cozumel before taking back towards the Yucatan shore. Since the entrance through the reef to The Hut (anchorage) was not visibly obvious, we elected to continue on north to Peurto Morales - a previous port of call.  It does appear like there is a marina at the Hut now, but this was not mentioned in the guide.  We stayed in Morales again at Marina El Cid (see earlier post).  Another factor to this decision was that the NOAA forcast has been calling for higher winds at night due to the diurnal heating effect of the Yucatan land mass.  Although the reef at the Hut provides protection from waves, higher winds could make for an uncomfortable night.

We had a relatively quiet night in Morales with a home-cooked meal on board.  As previously described, the marina at Peurto Morales has an easy entrance, is very well maintained with floating docks and is well protected with a high rock sea-wall.

The next morning we headed out to Isla.  This was one of the best sails of the trip to date!  Although we were close-hauled, we found the "sweet spot" for both the boat and the ocean.  At depths of over 100 ft, the seas were a little confused, but we were making great speed.  At one point, we clocked 9.5kts SOG.  We moved a little closer to shore (100 ft depth) and the seas became calm, but still had some influence from the gulf stream.  We were making 7.5  kts, the boat was not stressed and was very balanced.  Perfecto!

All-in-all this was a wonderful sail back to Isla Mujeres.  So now we are chilling for a couple of days, trying to modify our USCG Permit to Enter Cuban Territorial Seas (to reflect adding a crew member), and waiting for Patrick's arrival.

Chilling on the sail North

We entered Isla Mujeres via Swift Current Pass - our first time through ........hmmm should I have taken note of the name first?  Actually it was not too bad.  We saw depths of 8.5 ft as the lowest, which corresponded pretty well with the chart (we were at about low tide).  Amazing as in other areas, the charts had been way off in areas where the depths were over 100 ft.

Arriving at Isla via "Swift Current Pass"

As a general note, we have been using Navionics electronic charts.  There are large areas where there is not much detail - for example, several areas south of Isla show as "blue" and the detail description states "depth area 0 to 65 ft".......not a lot of use!  Having said that we generally tried to follow the 60-65 ft. depth line and sometimes got as shallow as 40 ft.  This gave us no problem and generally kept us out of what we termed the "confused sea zone" which was typically at 65+ to about 150 ft. depth