Clearing in to Mexico

Clearing through customs and immigration is involved enough to warrant its own post. Benito had made arrangements for us to stay at a marina the first night. The marina is beautiful, sheltered, has a pool and hot showers, and is only $1 a foot. Needless to say, we have extended our stay for the week.

When you clear in to Mexico you have to have five copies of all your paperwork, and each copy has to get 5 stamps: customs, agriculture, sanidad, immigration, and harbor master. When we arrived the marina had a customs officer as well as the officer of sanidad (which they kept translating to English as sanity instead of health or sanitation). There was also a person there from the department of agriculture.

We had to give them five copies of our crew list, copies and originals of all of our passports, the certificate of documentation on the boat and all the paperwork for Skipper. They also needed proof of our last port of call. We found a receipt from the West Marine in Key West and they accepted that.

We had to wait on the boat for the officers to review the paperwork.

Then the Sanidad/Quarantine officer asked all the infectious disease questions and used a laser to take our temperature– (was concerned I had a fever but I was ROASTING since until we cleared we couldn’t plug in to power on the dock so we had no air conditioning while we waiting on our boat). He also wanted to know if we had fumigated the boat– apparently that is required if you come from Cuba and many of the marinas require it. We have never fumigated the boat but he let it slide. I don’t know if it wasn’t really necessary, or how much Benito was smoothing things along for us. The Customs and Agriculture officers came on board and looked around, asked the usual questions– do you have any weapons, more than $10,000 cash, alcohol on board? The agriculture lady took our apples, but left the limes, celery, potatoes, onions, zucchini, and carrots. She said there was a hole in one of the apples, although I had had one for breakfast and they seemed fine to me.

Eventually they said we could go to shore, we were ready for the next step. We were ahead of the game because the marina arranged for several of the officers to start the process there instead of doing it all in town.

Since there were five of us we took two taxis into town. The rule here is a taxi can carry up to 4 passengers, and they don’t have to be in the same party. So if a taxi goes by that only has two passengers it will stop and pick up two more. Its like a mandatory ride share/ carpooling system. We went to the immigration office downtown. They reviewed all of our paperwork and gave us a bill. Then we took the bill down to the bank, got pesos from the ATM, paid the bill (558 pesos per person, about 125 American dollars total), then took the receipt of payment back to immigration office. They stamped our paperwork. Then we walked to the Harbormaster office but they closed at 14:30 so we were too late. So far we had the stamps from Immigration, Agriculture, and Sanidad. Coincidentally across the street from the Harbormaster office downtown we ran into the same officers that we had seen from the marina. They saw that we had the immigration stamp, so now we could get stamp #4, the customs stamp.

They also expressed concern that they had stayed at work later than normal and needed extra money to pay for the ferry to get back home, so we gladly assisted them with their ferry fees for 200 pesos. (about $10)

The Harbormaster would have to wait for the next day, so we explored the town. Benito knows this little place that gives you all you can eat free appetizers if you buy beer. We were all hot and thirsty and tired and stuffed ourselves for less than $20 (American).

The next day we went to the harbormaster office. It was supposed to open at 8:30. We got there at 8:30, they opened around 9:30 or 10. We were there until 11:30 waiting for the people to get to work and start processing paperwork. . The harbormaster had to go over all the paperwork and then issue a bill. The bill had to be taken to the bank, then the receipt returned to the harbormaster for him to stamp our paperwork.

While there we ran into several other sailors from Holland, Germany, Quebec, and Belgium checking in as well. They were earlier in the process of checking in to Mexico, so we all helped each other in this scavenger hunt of stamps. I overheard the Harbormaster tell them to go to Immigration down the street, but no one explained the whole process– Immigration then bank then return then customs then Agriculture and Sanidad. It is confusing and even harder with the mixture of languages, although all those sailors spoke excellent English.

We now had all five stamps, so we were checked in, but we still needed to do one final thing to check in the boat and for this we had to take a ferry to Cancun. We started early, and bought some empanadas and panuchos for breakfast just outside the ferry station.

We took the ferry to Cancun, then took a taxi to the office to import the boat. I had brought with me all of the paperwork from the day before as well as our passports and certificate of documentation and a printout of all the equipment and serial numbers of all the equipment on the boat. However the lady there said she needed a copy of the survey of the boat. I have that in dropbox, but didn’t have a copy. So then we took a taxi to one of those internet/ call places in downtown Cancun. I signed into my account (using Spanish Google), printed out a copy of the boat survey, and we returned to the office, gave them 60 American dollars, and got the final documentation done. At then end of this we are allowed to be in Mexico for 6 months, and the boat can stay for 10 years.

We jotted down what it is going to take to checkout, hopefully by then we will be pros.