Manuel Real Barragan heaves a faint sigh of despair, furrowing his sun-baked brow as he glances out beyond the far end of the Chapala pier. As head of the vigilance council for the local tour boat operators association, he is up against the challenge of literally keeping business afloat.
Lake Chapala’s rapidly receding water line has put the lancheros in a predicament they haven’t experienced for the last decade.
At the beginning of this year the tour boats tied up to board passengers at the pier’s north end. Today, they pitch in knee-deep water below the lighthouse at the opposite extreme. At the rate things are going, the entire structure will be completely land-locked in a matter of days.
Over the last four months, the boatmen have repeated the vexatious task of relocating their wooden docks just to keep pace with the lake’s withdrawal. But this week they turned to more drastic measures, hiring a track hoe to excavate a navigation channel leading out from the pier to deeper water.
“The water here is barely 20 to 30 centimeters deep” Real says, pointing down at the dock. “We need at least a half meter to navigate. And if a boat runs into an underwater ridge or a big rock, someone has to wade out a push it free.”
He explains that the 1.20 meter depth and exact placement of the trench was planned on the basis of the boatmen’s knowledge and expert advice from Manuel Guzman Arroyo, director of the University of Guadalajara’s Limnology Institute. Factors such as prevailing winds, water currents and the lay of the lakebed surface were all taken into account.
The lanchero association scrounged up enough pesos to cover eight hours worth of excavation work, plus special funding arranged through Chapala Mayor Joaquin Huerta for an additional 16 hours. An extra eight hours were lined up when it quickly became evident that wouldn’t be enough time. The private outfit contracted for the job conceded to a discounted rate of 850 pesos per hour.
Real labels the trench digging project as an emergency “home remedy” to avoid suspending boat activity until the lake recovers. “What we really need is a dredge operation to recondition the waterfront.”
To that end, Huerta lent his support by filing a request with Mexico’s Secretariat of the Navy. Hopes dimmed when a response that the mayor qualified as a “government run-around” arrived this week.
Official data on Lake Chapala is likewise discouraging. It now stands at 39 percent of potential full capacity, with a water volume of about three billion cubic meters – a 10-year low. More telling are figures on the extension of water covering the lakebed.
At the end of April 2011 water stretched over a surface area of 104,399 hectares. As of this week it spreads over just 96,230 hectares. The loss – equivalent to more than 20,000 acres – is most prominently visible at the shallowest points in the lake such as the Chapala waterfront.
The current situation is reminiscent of the desolate scene of the 2003 dry season, when Chapala’s beach stretched out more than a kilometer past the lighthouse. In those days the lancheros employed a pickup cleverly disguised as a tourist launch to ferry passengers out the water’s edge.
Somehow they will likely come up with new strategies to weather the latest crisis and live up to the association’s title drawn from the region’s Independence era heroes: Guerreros Inmortales (immortal warriors).