There are no crocodiles in the ocean, but they do live in the saltwater lagoons on the interior of some beaches.
Bahia Chamela is the first well-protected anchorage south of Cabo Corrientes, and we approached the bay just as the sun rose after an overnight sail from (and one last surf session in) Punta Mita. A giant crescent ringed by white sand beaches and fringed with palm trees, Bahia Chamela is a postcard.
Town square – at night, it’s ringed by food vendors and families enjoying the cooler conditions
Perula is the village at the north end of the bay – we anchored just in front of the town’s palapa restaurants in the crystal clear water, watching as the anchor hit the bottom in a cloud of sand 30 feet down. What looked like large tuna (but probably weren’t) immediately took up residence in the shade cast by Madrone’s hull – they stayed with us until we left three days later.
Main street in Perula
Like many small Mexican coastal towns, Perula has a single paved main road, with dirt/sand roads in the rest of the town. Shops open in the morning and late afternoon/evening, while most of the town shuts down in the middle of the day – no one really wants to be out in the heat and the sun of the early afternoon.
Molcajete means stone bowl, but it can also refer to the food that’s served in it. In this case it was a seafood stew, and the molcajete holds the heat well enough that the broth was still bubbling by the end. Delicious!
We took advantage of the clear water to do some bottom maintenance, scraping a few baby barnacles that somehow manage to cling to our supposedly toxic bottom paint and cleaning the main prop, shaft, and bow thruster. We were only able to cover a couple of the ~10 miles of beach by foot before retiring to a palapa restaurant for a delicious lunch of molcajete with tamarind margaritas.
Have we mentioned that Mexico is pretty nice?
