Tsunami #2

March 11, 2011 was pretty interesting here in La Cruz. We normally leave the VHF on 24/7 (this is the primary source of communication in the cruising community) in case someone tries to contact us or an emergency comes up that we need to respond to but the night before I had tired of listening to a couple drunks making stupid comments on the radio and turned it down. At 8am Friday I turned the volume back up and the first thing I heard was “tsunami”. “Oh no…not again!” Last year we were in Las Hadas when the tsunami from Chile rolled through. We went to sea and that one turned out to be pretty uneventful. The predictions for this one were more severe.

We were told that all ports in Mexico were closed and boats could not enter or leave any of them. As you can well imagine, some of the folks in the marina here were in a near panic mode and a line began to form at the port captain's office to get permission to go to sea. Finally an announcement was made that the closures were for commercial traffic only (including boats used for charter) and that pleasure vessels were free to leave. Now we needed to make a decision. We listened to all the predictions and got all the information we could and then decided to stay in the marina. We are at the dock that is the farthest inside and we only draw 5'. Since we have quite a bit of water under the keel at the lowest of tides, we thought we'd be OK. About 1/2 the boats in the marina (all the marinas in the bay, actually) left and went out into deep water. The rest of us added extra lines, closed ports/hatches, tied things down, etc. Then we waited.

The prediction was that the tsunami would begin around 1:30 and we were in the palapa restaurant (on the 2nd floor) with the others who didn’t leave, watching, waiting and having lunch. Several TV's were tuned to either CNN or a Los Angeles station so we were getting all the news about what was happening in Japan & the States. At 1:30 the water began to move faster than normal but it was only rising and falling a few inches at a time so some people thought it was going to be a non-event. As the afternoon passed, the water moved in and out until the amount of change was 5 or 6 ft. Chris & I went back to Faith and read books, listened to the chatter on the radio and watched the water. Since we are way inside of the marina what we experienced was rather like extreme tidal changes that happened fast but there were no waves or big surges. By the time the water got to us it seemed to have dissipated enough that it didn't even rock the boat. Our friends, Linde & Ken on "Rosebud" are on the jetty side and Linde said when she was below she could hear the water moving past the boat so fast it sounded like they were out sailing. She also said there were eddies and whirlpools around the ends of the docks on that side.

About 4pm boats were starting to radio in that they wanted to return to the marinas. An announcement was made that the Port Captain had determined the surge at the marina entrance was too dangerous to negotiate and he was closing the port. Chris & I decided to walk out on the jetty and take a look since it was so calm on our side of the marina. It was amazing to watch. A huge amount of water would surge into the narrow marina entrance for a few minutes, there would be a very short period where the water was slack (about 30 seconds) and then it would turn around and roar back out. I am not good at judging speed but the entrance channel looked like a fast flowing river with all the rapids happening and the buoys would be tipped almost completely on their sides. One of the marina managers announced that the current was as high as 15 knots.

We took photos and videos of the water and while we were watching and filming, a big section of dock 11 buckled and twisted and broke off. Dock 11 is the first dock inside the marina entrance so it got the brunt of the surge and the 2 slips on the end of it lost big sections. The marina staff risked their lives to get those big cement chunks tied up so they wouldn't go bouncing through the rest of the marina and causing more damage.

While we were on the jetty taking pictures the Port Captain closed the entrance for the night as it was just too dangerous. That meant all the boats had to spend the night in the anchorage. Since these are cruising boats, and they are already provisioned with food, water, etc. it wasn’t a problem. Unfortunately, race 2 of the Banderas Bay Regatta had been scheduled for that day and wasn't cancelled until everyone was already out in the bay. Some of the racers left their anchors at the dock so there was apparently some scrambling about to borrow anchors and chain in order to avoid motoring or floating around all night.

All in all, the only real damage here was to the outside 2 slips on dock 11 and a couple of the channel markers went walkabout and will have to be re-set. I would guess that there are some new shoal areas in the anchorage and I heard on the radio that a new bar that has formed outside the entrance to Paradise Marina so they'll probably have to dredge that.

After watching the videos of the damage to marinas in Oregon and California it looks like we got off easy. And that is a very good thing!