La Paz Channel

New buoys and markers tossed out at the entrance to La Paz Channel have confused and dazed some visiting boaters, resulting in groundings. A grounding is when the depth of your boat exceeds the depth of the water. Scrape, crunch, pop. Further fouling things up, some commercial ships’ anchor ropes ran a long way to too, capturing some small craft in their lines like a spider. Heads up, boaters, at press time the imprudently placed buoys were still undergoing a switcharoo. Capt. Uwe of the 93-foot Belarius, pulled three wayward boats off a sandbar in just one day. “For a while, every day we’d hear at least one boat calling on the VHF that they had gone aground trying to follow the new markers,” he said.

Large commercial ships began unloading at a new spot near the power generating station on the south side of Punta Prieta, which is 700 yards west of the channel entrance. A close mix for commercial and pleasure craft.

To keep its stern aligned to the commercial pier, each ship ties its bow to a six foot high, 15 foot wide buoy anchored well offshore. In daytime, other vessels coming around Punta Prieta can easily see the ship and alter course around its south end, and south of its offshore mooring buoy as well, before coming north and entering the well-marked La Paz Channel. At night, the ship’s mooring buoy is lighted and is large enough to be radarvisible, though confusing.

However, for the first three or four days of this new operation, low-lying breast lines were run from shore to the offshore buoy, even when a ship was not using it. Commercial shipping vessels were notified in Spanish, but evidently the yachting community did not get the message.

During this period, several sailboat skippers reported having “clotheslined” themselves while rounding Punta Prieta, ramming their masts or upper rigging into the nearly invisible mooring lines. No injuries or serious damage were reported.

After the clotheslining incidents, cruiser radio nets broadcast warnings to help boaters avoid the new mooring buoys and their shore lines, and local marinas notified their guests to stay well outside the area when entering and leaving La Paz.

In mid-November, intending to prevent more accidents, the port captain of La Paz placed several new marker buoys - red and green lighted cans and nuns - in an “S” pattern. But because the new reds and greens visually overlap the original red and green channel markers, skippers approaching at night thought they were already inside the narrow La Paz Channel, so they turned south - only to run aground on the sandbar that forms outside the channel.

Gabriel Lay, dockmaster at Marina CostaBaja, reported that the port captain has now removed the breast lines to the ship’s offshore mooring buoy, at least for the present, and has made several changes to the marker buoys.