Crocodiles, bugs and sting rays, Oh my!

TENACATITA, Jalisco, Mexico - Setting up a general interest publication is tricky, especially in moving to a new community in which you have only vacationed, never lived for a length of time.

In all the cities (ok, towns) where I worked as a newspaper editor and writer, it always took awhile to figure out who was who and what was what and what constituted a real story.

But at Tenacatita and in nearby neighbor La Manzanilla (the big city), some stories come to mind even before we get there.

Take the cocodrilos lounging in the mangroves at the north end of the village, for example.

Every once in awhile these things get loose and have to be returned to the swamp refuge they call home. How many German tourists have had a close encounter with a 20-foot croc? Have any of these things ever decided to take a midnight stroll up the main avenida, perhaps headed to Palapa Joe's for a late-night snack of a French tourist. (Germans would be too hard to digest after midnight.)


A small croc found wandering

Or bugs?

The no-see-ums on the beaches can be ferocious at sundown. And ferocious is the right word. I always come home from a vacation covered with welts because I forget to use the powerful bug sprays they sell in Mexico. Pouring tequila on the stings helps, followed by some taken orally.

And the sting rays?


On patrol for swimmers

Well, I know that they frequent the shallow water at the anchorage where most of the yachts anchor because I once waded out in the middle of school with my amigo Sanders Lamont. Never had a sting ray sting me. Never want one to. But if a tourist gets whacked, well, that's news.

In the meantime, I've been looking at designs for world headquarters for the TBB, some simple, some more elaborate.


One proposed design for the Tenacatita Bay Bugle headquarters

Two weeks until touchdown at Admiralty Beach

LA MANZANILLA, Jalisco, Mexico - It's only two weeks until the Admiral and I will visit the TBB offices on a swing through Jalisco with a one-night stop over in Puerto Vallarta at son Dustin's casita.

We expect to meet with Joe Santana & Company of Santana Realty to work out the details about the construction site where we will be building the Bugle's world headquarters and boogie-boarding enterprise.

With any luck, we will also be looking at the site for the soon-to-be established Tenacatita Bay Yacht Club, Admiral Fox to be founding Commodore.

I've been a commodore once and will prefer to be the guy who keeps the beer cooler full and the peanut dishes clean after that experience.

It could be that we will be able to get the right kind of vehicle to take full ride all the way up Admiralty Beach to see how construction is going on up there. Perhaps someone is building a competing publication already.

Regardless, it will be great to be back in the land of warm weather, cold beer and people who don't live on their email and computers.

Like me, right now.


North end of Admiralty Beach


Joe Santana leads a beach tour in January

First posting for the Tenacatita Bay Bugle

TENACATITA, Jalisco, Mexico - Today marks the first blog of the Tenacatita Bay Bugle, a publication belonging to - and to be published by - journalists Michael Fitzgerald & Sylvia Fox who are in the process of trying to move from the U.S. to the Admiralty Beach area of Tenacatita.

For persons not familiar with that part of the Costa Alegre, the pueblo of Tenacatita is at the northwest corner of Tenacatita Bay, at the end of a long crescent-shaped beach.

World headquarters for the Bugle is only two short blocks from downtown with an oceanfront view of the Pacific.


Bugle's temporary headquarters

Of course, this is just the temporary facility - grand plans are already being drafted that would make Charles Foster Kane envious.

More on when the Bugle's new building will be built and regular publishing dates will follow in coming weeks and months.

In the mean, listen for the Bugle and here's a couple of other photos from the area:


View from the publisher's office window


Tenacatita downtown, facing the bay