Jungle Cruise

Tenacatita [19 18.079N, 104 49.953W]

Feb 12, 2008

Greetings all!

This is a picture of us dropping anchor in the bay. I’m standing on the bow, preparing to drop anchor while Roberta is driving. You can’t tell it in this picture, but we were experimenting with some little wireless headsets that we bought. While I’m standing on the bow, Roberta and I are debating the best location to drop the anchor (which is usually a vigorous debate), and she is feeding me information about depth. I also have her reporting every 25’ on how much anchor chain we have out. We’ve experimented with walkie-talkies in the past, and this is the first system we really thought worked well. It’s the TD900, by Eartec. It’s full-duplex, meaning it works like a telephone – there’s no buttons to press. We just talk naturally.

While we were in Puerto Vallarta we had dinner with  Steven and Carol Argosy, Nordhavn 62 owners. During dinner they mentioned that we should check out the “Jungle Cruise” in Tenacatita. They described it as an hour long passage through a shallow narrow canal that culminated at a beach with several decent restaurants. This sounded like a perfect Ken/Roberta adventure. We had Steven show us on Google Earth where the shallow parts were. Steven cautioned us that we would be certain we were on the wrong path, and that passage was impossible, but that we should just keep going.

Here you see the anchorage at Tenacatita, and the
narrow entrance to the “Jungle Cruise”

The entrance to the river was easier than it appeared. There were breaking waves, but fairly small ones. The bigger problem was that we needed to get into the water to walk the boat across the sand bar. I had overheard on the radio someone describing receiving a stingray bite the day before. Apparently the stingrays like to lurk on the sand in the shallow water, and a bite can be quite painful. I hadn’t brought shoes, and Dean had, so I was quite happy to delegate this duty.

Note the depth – about 9 inches!

Only about the first half mile of the river was particularly shallow. We had to move very slow, and watch for the “deep” water (by which I mean anything over about 12” deep).

As we continued,  the river was continually narrowing. The depths were running from 3’ to about 10’.

For about another mile, the river continued to be perhaps 20’ wide, twisting through high dense vegetation. We assumed that this would continue for several more miles, when suddenly it started becoming much more narrow.

I’m not accustomed to thinking of our 15’ AB Inflatable tender as large, but it suddenly felt much too wide. We were constantly rubbing one side or the other against the brush. I was worried that we would hit one of the many protruding branches, pop a tube, and be literally “up the creek.” We had decided that Roberta would drive us up the river, and I would drive us back down. Roberta was doing an exceptional job of navigating the narrow passage. However, even the slightest error meant bouncing off of the trees, and getting wacked on the head by a branch. This was terrific practice in tendering skills. With only a foot, or less, of clearance on each side, we needed to learn quickly.

It was exactly like being on a jungle cruise at Disneyland, except that we kept reminding ourselves that this was a real jungle. There was more than one comparison to the movie African Queen where Humphrey Bogart has to push his, and Katherine Hepburn’s, boat through a similar river, only to find his body covered with leeches when re-entering the boat. We also wondered if there were crocodiles and snakes in the water. None of this conversation was particularly calming.

Here we see Dean reacting to a brief encounter with a low hanging branch,

while awaiting the next encounter

For perhaps two miles, we battled through the incredibly narrow river, with vegetation so thick that we couldn’t see the sky.

Shelby, our dog, thought this was all great fun

Ultimately, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a large lagoon. At the end of the lagoon was a “tender parking lot”.

After parking the tender, we walked another 100 feet, and discovered the promised beach and restaurants!

This had been planned as our last day in Tenacatita, but we were having serious fun! Conversation over lunch focused on “Why do we want to leave here so soon?” We do need to get rolling farther south, but perhaps an extra day wouldn’t hurt….

Ken and Dean pushing the boat TOWARDS the approaching waves

On the way back I did indeed drive the tender, and after a disastrous start, which provided much amusement, I made it fine through the jungle. I then decided to brave the sting rays, and jumped into the water to help Dean bring the tender across the sand bar. I was hoping that my hat would frighten away any lurking critters, but it did not work. We did see a couple stingrays, but avoided step on any.

Before closing out for today, I received an email asking me to do a bit of reporting on what immigration issues we’ve had traveling with a dog.

Shelby has cruised with us in France, Portugal and Spain, without problem. We had all the proper paperwork on entering France, but on all occasions they’ve just waved her through. She has been to Italy without incident, and I can’t imagine troubles in most of southern Europe (Croatia, Greece, Sardinia, Corsica).  England is a problem, and it is unlikely we’ll ever take her there. I don’t know about the other countries in Northern Europe, as I have a strong warm-water bias. We’ve also cruised with her in Bermuda and the Bahamas, without problem (beyond having her shots and papers in order). She has cruised in and out of Canada many times.

My current focus is on Polynesia and Hawaii. We’ve been planning to go to Hawaii rather than Polynesia, because we knew we could get Shelby into the country with a short 5-day quarantine. I have had a hard time receiving a response from Polynesia, but then just received this disheartening response this morning. We had hoped that once Shelby had been admitted to Hawaii and spent time there, we could then go to Polynesia, and not have a problem. It now appears that Polynesia would insist on a 30 day quarantine, which is more than an older dog like Shelby could take. Hopefully there is a workaround.

As always, thank you! And, happy cruising. But, don’t stop reading. Excerpts from emails I’ve received appear below. My responses are preceded by +++

Ken Williams

Sans Souci, Nordhavn68.com