On a remote beach on beautiful Isla San Francisco in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, we met a young teenager named Freddy. Despite him having no English, and us possessing only rudimentary Spanish, we “chatted” with him for a while. He excitedly invited us to visit his nearby home village of Punta Alta and drew us a map in the sand of how to find it. When we next pulled up our anchor, that was where we headed.
To say that Punta Alta is “remote” would be an understatement. It’s a tiny village of about ten concrete block homes perched on a steep cobble beach surrounded by sheer thousand-foot-tall cliffs. The only way in or out is by boat. With an anchorage exposed to the full fetch of the gulf when an easterly wind blows and poor holding ground, it was understandably not discussed in any of our cruising guides or amongst the bluewater cruising community. It sounded perfect!
As soon as Atalanta appeared in the cove, Freddy and some of his friends rowed out to meet us and clambered aboard. They then insisted we come ashore even though a visiting priest was delivering a small mass.
From the moment we rowed ashore in our inflatable dinghy (named “Dinghy Rainbow,”) the villagers made us feel welcome. They invited us into their homes for meals and pulled Vienna and Rhiannon into classes led by a traveling teacher in the tiny schoolhouse. They taught us to make tortillas; we taught them to play UNO. The men took Michael out fishing; the kids came to our boat to try out the swing rigged from our main mast. We held a joint birthday party for Vienna and one of the boys from Punta Alta, Mundo, whose birthdays were just a few days apart and happened to coincide with one of our visits.
We slowly untangled the web of family connections between the villagers. All told, there were four generations living there: the original couple (now great grandparents) who settled there from mainland Mexico to build a better life, their seven adult sons and their wives, those couples’ children, some of whom were now adults themselves and had children of their own. There were tiny aunts and uncles running around whose nieces and nephews were much older than them. And everyone looked out for everyone—if one kid was doing something wrong (throwing rocks at one of the hapless dogs who hung out in the village, say), any number of relatives were on hand to scold them. We realized that this is how people had lived for most of human history before the industrial revolution.
We visited Punta Alta three separate times over the course of the ten or so months we spent exploring the Sea of Cortez. Those visits to Punta Alta remain among our strongest and fondest memories from our years sailing. We were struck by how kind and welcoming everyone in the village was to this boatload of gringos who showed up on their doorstep one day, invited there more or less on a whim by Freddy. When we returned after some time away, we were recognized at once and always greeted warmly and enthusiastically by the Punta Altans. Despite different languages and cultures and lived experiences, we became true friends.
During our voyaging, we encountered an enormous range of people and places, sights and sites. Part of the cruiser’s mindset is recognizing the inherent fullness of existence beyond ourselves and our boats: Punta Alta is not just there for us to experience life in a remote Mexican village. The Maya ruins have stood for hundreds of years before we ever got there to marvel at them, and they will continue weathering the future long after we’re gone. The magnificent cathedral of Mexico City is revered by the many who still attend regular services there. And that cathedral itself is built with the stone from the seven iterations of successively larger Aztec pyramids directly below it, destroyed during the Spanish conquest. Every person, whether living or long dead, experiences (or experienced, in the case of the long-dead ones) a life as vivid and personal and important to them as ours are to ourselves.
We—each and every one of us—experience people and things, and they experience us too. When we were met warmly by locals of the places we visited, it was often at least in part because they had had positive experiences with previous cruisers they encountered. We could then do our part to leave people with a positive impression of us and our group of cruisers. And so on, and so on.
While you may not have perfect control over how someone perceives or reacts to you, you do have a lot of power to contribute positivity to those interactions and leave them on a good note, with a good experience. In other words, to leave a clean wake.
Long-distance cruising is a truly immersive, all-encompassing experience that requires the right preparation, the right skills, and the right mindset. In addition to ensuring that the boat’s physical wake is clean—no trash, sewage, or chemicals trailing behind—one must endeavor to leave a clean metaphorical wake as well.
Boats leave wakes, and so do people. By approaching interactions with respect and curiosity, a good sailor can leave a clean wake behind her as she goes about her voyage through the world.
This is a heart warming story of cross-cultural interaction. Do you happen to have any photos of the Mayan ruins? That would interests me greatly. Regards, TCE⁹
What memories...