Day 1, Sunday - Arriving in Barra Navidad Lagoon

While in Tenacatita, we had been participating in the daily cruisers net. Every day at 9:00 am, we would turn the VHF radio to channel 22, and when the net controller would call out for check-in's in Tenacatita, we would respond by saying our boat's name: RHAPSODY! On the second day of the net we heard our friends from TICA, Bill and Joanne, check in, and called them after the net. Bill, you'll remember was the drummer with which I had done the New Years gig in Bucerias.

Bill told me that there would be some chances for jams, and even potentially gigs, when we arrived in Barra. So we were already looking forward to it when we finally pulled up anchor and left Bahia Tenacatita on Sunday. For this short passage, tho, rather than get up early, we decided to wait for the afternoon winds so that we could sail at least part of the way. We left Tenacatita at about 1:30 pm, and sure enough had a fine sail all the way into Bahia Navidad, 20 nm to the south.

We were concerned about making the bar crossing into the lagoon channel, so that was another reason we had waited til the afternoon for the high tide. We had no problem getting thru the channel and into the lagoon, although many boats do go aground here. We were using waypoints that I developed by looking at the channel in Google Earth, in conjunction with the charts from the Rain's book. As usual, the chartplotter was so inaccurate as to be useless. When plotted, my track in the chart plotter goes over land at several points!

Nonetheless, as I said, we had no problem getting thru the channel, and were soon at anchor in 10' over sand and mud in the placid waters of the lagoon. We called TICA, who had put the word out of an impending jam, and Bill referred me to a gentleman named Frosty on a boat named ANGELFISH, whom he said he had played with and thought was a pretty good guitar player. I hooked up with Frosty on the VHF and we made a plan to get together the next day (Monday) and jam a bit to see if we could work something out. We also found out at that time that on Monday night there was to be a benefit fair and concert in the next town over, Melaque, so we also made plans with Bill and Joanne to attend the concert with them and some of their friends.

After that, we took a water taxi into shore for a quick reconnaisance of Barra de Navidad. The water taxis are great. For $2.50, round trip, they come pick you up at your boat and drop you off right in town. They're also open 24 hours a day, which would be of key importance later in the week when we were closing the bars at 2-3 a.m.! We poked our noses around town a bit, had a beer at a local restaurant, and then came back out to RHAPSODY where we had a nice dinner.

First images of Barra