Music and the Tsunami

I've had a couple of questions from friends and family about what we experienced onboard Music when the tsunami came through, so I thought I'd share a little bit with you.

To start with, when we heard about the approaching tsunami I set our VHF radio to “scan” because on our normal cruiser communication channel (channel 22) I was hearing what appeared to be some audio distortion to someone’s communication. Since I wanted to be sure our radio was not suddenly malfunctioning. I put it in “scan” mode to see what we could pick up. Then, while in “scan” mode I picked up someone else’s conversation and they were discussing a projected “tsunami”. Well, I wasn’t quite sure if it was real or rumor, so I pressed the microphone button and said “break”. When acknowledged, I asked my question, and was subsequently given details. With that, I switched back to channel 22, and announced to the fleet in the cove of Las Hadas if anyone knew of a potential tsunami? That seemed to wake up the cruising community and started a lot of discussion. (Mexico’s president had issued a tsunami warning that morning, which was lifted about 9PM local time.)

The net result was that most of us decided that we should head to deeper water and monitor the situation. Within 15 minutes Gail and I had our anchor up and were heading out of the cove into deeper water. Once out with about 200 ft of depth under Music I tuned our SSB radio to get more information. Basically we learned that while the first event (that’s what they called it) was to occur about 1:30PM local time, there was a 6 to 7 hour window for subsequent events. Well, that meant that we would be out on the water the rest of the morning and all afternoon. And heck, it was a gorgeous day, so we decided that instead of just floating there we’d start our retreat to Banderas Bay, and head about 30 miles north to Bahia Tenacatita.

En route we heard about the port captain closing Barra de Navidad due to strong currents in the bottle neck channel going into the lagoon. A first hand report mentioned that the buoys were getting drug under water. – Well, the buoys in Barra are rather undersize compared with most “normal” channel buoys so that’s not hard to imagine. The next day we found out that in addition to the buoys being drug under water the more significant event issue was that the water pipe (maybe more like a hose?) running across the channel, and anchored to its bottom, floated free. This subsequently resulted in the “port” being closed for several days, not just over night as I originally thought.

In Banderas Bay the ports captains (there are 3 major ports as far as I know) closed their respective ports over night so many of those out on the bay, floated, bobbed, or sailed all night as many of the boats were participating in Banderas Bay race week and didn’t have any anchors onboard. The cruisers who left port, got to sleep that night after anchoring.

What the tsunami did in port areas such as Nuevo Vallarta and even la Cruz was surge in and out, and in and out. La Cruz suffered some relatively minor dock damage but that was it. It appears that some of the smaller bays such as Tenacatita where we anchored that night, essentially filled up a bit more than usual and the water in them sloshed around for a day or so.

While this was our event, our hearts go out to all of the earthquake victims and to all of those less fortunate along the various coasts that the tsunami did reach in force. - John