From Ixtapa we sailed south to Acapulco, which was two days at sea. You’d think a stint like that might get boring but we had one of our fullest days 35 miles offshore. First thing in the morning, we caught a Jack. As a rule, we don’t eat Jacks aboard El Tiburon, from previous unpleasant experiences, so we threw it back. Then around 10 AM we saw a bunch of splashing going on in the water about 100 yards away and not thirty minutes later there was a brisk zing on our fishing pole. The creature on the other end jumped and flailed. We'd caught a sailfish!

Out came the video camera to document the whole thing:

Look closely and you’ll see that although it looks brown, the fish is indeed sort of, like, purple.

So we caught two big sailfish that morning and just when we thought the excitement was done for the day a huge ray came over to see what all the commotion was about. John got in the water to swim with it.

A few hours later we noticed we were passing first a few, and then many sea turtles, all floating serenely at the surface, unperturbed by our intrusion. We slowed down to observe them and noticed that the water was swarming with little jellyfish, upon which the turtles were feasting. The guys got in to swim with the friendly, ancient creatures.

Later in the day we were swarmed by hundreds (not an exaggeration) of dolphins. We’d never seen so many dolphins around our boat at one time. There were at least thirty of them crammed at our bow, each one trying to surf our wake. Their high-pitched conversations were so loud I could hear them through the hull when I took a shower. Kitty was enthralled by them.

That night we discovered a little baby squid on the bathmat in the head. It was anyone’s guess how it got there. Maybe it had been caught in somebody’s board shorts?

All day on the open ocean and not an hour went by when something interesting wasn’t going on. It was a banner day.

After sailing into Acapulco bay, we got a creepy feeling about the place. It was overly developed with plenty of abandoned buildings, there were all kinds of debris floating everywhere in the water (including a rotting sailfish head), and the harbor was full of dilapidated boats. The place gave us the heebie jeebies, so we turned around and headed south for Huatulco.