Assumptions

By the time we approached Progreso it was already pitch dark. We saw lots of bright neon lights on the water, and we figured they must be local fisherman doing the night fishing with lamps.

As we were passing near one of them an open boat without any lights approached us out of nowhere. There were two guys in the boat; one was in the back stirring the outboard engine, and the other one was at the front of the boat yelling something at us. We had no idea what he was saying since none of us speak Spanish. It looked as if he was warning us of something.

A lesson from my artificial intelligence book: in all human communication, very little is actually communicated, and most of information is actually assumed by the parties that communicate.

Later we figured, the poor guy was not speaking Spanish at all--it was just our assumption. He was yelling "Nets, nets!" as we kept yelling back at him: "No habla Espanol!" They sure thought we are complete idiots.

Soon after that we noticed that our boat is passing across something that looked like a rope stretched underneath the water. Luckily, our prop didn't get caught in their net and everything was fine.

Finding the fuel dock at night, in an unfamiliar port and shallow water was an intense experience. But after some going back and forth we eventually found it. We tied to the fuel station dock around midnight. There was nobody there so we just took some time to clean up our boat, and we all took a shower.

It was funny to walk on the dry land after spending so much time on the waves. I heard stories about "sea legs" but I thought they were a bit of exaggeration. Well, it's not; I really felt insecure as I was trying to revert back to my "land legs".

In the morning we met some very nice people who helped us refuel, refill our water tank, and we were even able to buy some Coke and beer (they only had Superior and Sol, no Modelo or at least XX... so we had to put our beer snobbism aside and we opted for Superior. Such a hard life it is to be a sailor--you always have to make compromises).

We are off motoring towards Isla Mujers now, and the sea is getting rougher and rougher. We are probably in 10-ft waves now, but we are pressing on.