Meeting the Locals
 
Before we had set the anchor securely, the locals were already out to welcome us.  A whole boatload of them.  They made gestures that we interpreted as a desire to come aboard.  We put out fenders on the port side to protect Star Chaser's new wax, and all the fiberglass beneath it.  Come aboard they did, all six of them.  Technically, there were only five humans.  The sixth was an underachieving, scrawny, drug-sniffing black lab that really hated his job.  He had to be dragged aboard, and once aboard, he had to be dragged off.  As if to spite the Federales, he didn't sniff hard at all, except for a good going-over given to the puke residue on the aft port rail.  I've always been amazed at the dog's fascination with all things foul. It must take an incredible amount of training to teach a dog to prefer the rather innocuous smell of narcotics to that of say, decaying road-kill.  Surely, even the most highly decorated police dog would be stymied by a bloated, decaying raccoon corpse lashed to the foredeck. 
 
The Captain, armed with only an automatic pistol, accompanied by only one Uzi toting underling, braved the dark recesses of our saloon.  The other three bravely stayed on deck with Justin, armed with only one Uzi apiece, I guess to make sure we didn't have additional forces stationed around the point.  Like Navy frogmen were going to pop out of the Bufadero or something.
 
I began to break the ice with El Capitan.  "Speakey Spaney?" he asked in a serious tone.  I quickly parried with a "si senor".  "Pluma", he said, holding up his pen.  "Si, muy bonita, su pluma", I answered, ever the diplomat.  "Tiene pluma?"  "Si tengo!"  I replied, producing a pen from the nav station.  This is going well, I thought.  His pen, held together with tape and string, had written its last.
 
After looking over the ship's papers and our Zarpe from Acapulco, he scrawled his report and clambered back over the lifelines with his trainees in tow.  It seems Mexico's answer to Annapolis is located in Puerto Angel.  Here, new recruits learn to march, shout, and guard against foreign yacht invasion.  El Capitan had stolen our last good pen.
 
After a restful night, I reported to the (civilian) port captain with our papers from Acapulco.  I also reported the theft of the pen, which the captain graciously replaced with a new Bic. 
 
The normally idyllic anchorage at Puerto Angel can, with a Spring tide, erupt into a seething cauldron of treacherous swells coming from all directions.  This is the occasional swell of which our book spoke.  It happened the second day we were there.  Little Acapulco turned into a washing machine and it wasn't on the "gentle cycle".  We set a stern anchor, partly because we wanted to face into the worst of the swell and partly because there was a good chance our primary anchor would fail.  It was just like riding a big hobby horse with the springs being our anchor rodes.  We had some fun watching the beachfront restaurants lose a table and chairs or two on a big wave.  They'd send the local kids out swimming to retrieve them for tips.  That night, it wasn't so funny.  The hobby horse was rabid and it was pitch black out.  I reread The Complete Book of Anchoring and Mooring while we fought the "Battle of the Chafe" all night.   It nearly washed away the village.  It nearly washed us away.  It was "exciting". 
 
We met a nice family who ran a beach restaurant on Playa Panteon called Quetita, named after Queta, their youngest daughter, a sort of tomboy, who out-drives and out-fishes most of the men. Puerto Angel is located in the state of Oaxaca.  A major, if not number one cash crop of Oaxaca is marijuana.  It grows and is smoked almost universally.  Queta's boyfriend, a shark fisherman, told us that most shark fishermen smoke a lot of "mota".  "It makes the tedious work of finding and pulling in the big white sharks seem easier" he said, gesturing with his good hand.  That probably explains the rather large size of the cemetery in relation to the town.  The son, Chalo fished for sharks on El "Flipper", the aptly named launch, or "panga", the largest of the family's fleet of three.  It seems more and more fishermen are being seduced by the lucrative Asian shark fin trade.  These small boats travel hundreds of miles to kill Great White sharks for the fins.  The shark jaws are a powerful good luck symbol to the Hispanic fisherman, and the family gave us one, which we affixed to the mast.  Perhaps they sensed our need for extra luck.

 

    
The "big" yacht in the center is a 40-footer.        The "fleet" is grounded during the big swells.
 
Next Time: Tehuantepecers?