It was an uneventful motor-sail from Agua Verde to Puerto Escondido on March 6, 2016. A couple of lazy whales moseyed in the channel with a few leaping mobulus nearby.
Entering Puerto Escondido, we noticed some changes since our previous stop there. The narrow part of the entrance seemed to have been recently dredged, as it showed a pleasant least depth of 13'-14' at low tide. The Ellipse had been cleared of the derelict and abandoned boats that had been there for years. There were only 5 boats left in the Ellipse, all of them Med-moored. The mooring buoys in the main harbor that had been closest to the marina buildings were gone. It looked like only a total of 80 mooring buoys remained, and that they were all being gradually refitted with new tackle. We snagged one, among 23 other boats.
The Fox's anchor is stem-mounted, which requires us to tie up to mooring buoys slightly differently than do boats that have deck-mounted anchors. This tends to confuse onlookers; it looks from afar like our anchor will saw through the lines we've tied to the buoy. Well-meaning cruisers will go out of their way to tell us "the correct way" to tie to a mooring buoy, and that we aren't doing it. This seems to be especially true of cruisers who have reached a certain destination, have sailed no further, and learn no new sailing skills. No amount of explanation or reassurance can satisfy them. And this is super-especially true of the very opinionated permanent denizens bobbing around among Puerto Escondido's mooring field on boats that are no longer seaworthy.
So there we were. We'd just hooked up to the mooring buoy of our choice. I was due for a shower, but unfortunately once I'd gotten all soaped up belowdecks, the shower pump developed an air embolism. I had to sneak up topsides to rinse the soap off with the cockpit shower. At which precise time 2 permanent denizens roared up to The Fox in their dinghy to lecture me that we hadn't moored The Fox to their satisfaction, we were creating an emergency situation, and blah blah sanctimonious blah. All this, while I was hunched over, stark naked. And very wet. It took me 10 minutes to get the husband to STFU while the wife giggled awkwardly.
GB thought the whole thing was hilarious and continued to quietly work on the shower pump down below.
Sailing is like that sometimes.
And yes, Puerto Escondido denizens: indeed we DO know how to tie up to a mooring buoy. We got through the coming cold front better than YOU did, now didn't we?
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