Our clearing in process to Isla Mujeres from Key West has been a diabolical joke. This is not for the faint hearted.

The health inspector/doctor at the Port Captain’s office was very helpful and that part was easy. (Tie your dinghy on the inside of the dock at Marina Bartolomé which is just a short walk through a white metal gate to the Port Captain’s office; don’t tie it on the outside closer to the ferries as they will charge you 100 pesos/hour to leave it there and you’ll need at least 5-6 hours to complete everything. Assuming you are very lucky and can actually complete it.) So the doctor was fine, a decently friendly guy. Any paperwork you find online and print out ahead of time is going to be the wrong paperwork or filled out wrong–just fill it out in front of him the way he tells you and then go make copies of it elsewhere. All he needed was the crew list and the zarpe from the US. If you don’t have a zarpe you need to provide something like a receipt for fuel or from a marina the day you left the USA, and complete a form called the Acta Protesta where you plead for mercy that you didn’t get a zarpe and apologize and say you’ll never do it again. (We went to the Dry Tortugas first to wait for a weather window and got stuck there for a week. The office in Key West didn’t want to issue a zarpe and insisted that we didn’t need one. If this happens to you, be ready with a receipt and a willingness to complete the Acta Protesta or just don’t leave the port office in the US without a zarpe.) Also in general for all these steps, they also want a million copies of everything and take great personal joy in sending you away from offices to go make extra copies elsewhere, despite having their own copy machines visible; the fact that we brought a portable printer made them annoyed because the power trip they get from creating suffering/their ability to kick back and avoid doing their jobs was thwarted.

The next step was the immigration office where despite being told by the health inspector that we didn’t need anything else, they wanted different copies of totally different things and again our ability to stay in their office and print those things out immediately deepened their simmering bureaucratic rage. The immigration officer didn’t stamp a paper that we needed to have stamped (more on that later) but didn’t tell us. On purpose. Knowing we would run into a problem in our next step. He also berated us for filling out the FMM half in blue ink and half in black, despite those being the pens he provided, and when his supervisor told him it didn’t matter it made him very angry. He failed to give us copies of the FMM which also became a problem when we tried to get a TIP.

The third step was back at the Port Captain’s office with the agricultural agent and boat inspection. The agricultural agent lady was very sweet and the agent who dinghied out to the boat wasn’t looking for a bribe or to extort food or alcohol which was a pleasant surprise given what we knew of the way that shakedown typically works. We’re vegetarian and didn’t have much booze at all so maybe there just wasn’t anything worth taking. Also at this step, despite people in the previous step saying you have all the paperwork you need, they will want different paperwork and multiple copies of it. None of these services have any idea of what their sister departments require but they will insist that you’re good to go.

We weren’t able to properly complete this step because the immigration guy hadn’t stamped one of our papers. We had to rush back there and inform him there had been an error and one of our papers, the crew list, was missing a stamp. He said he hadn’t stamped it because the previous guy hadn’t stamped it first and therefore he couldn’t. Instead of alerting us to this apparent discrepancy he’d just sent us on our way to fall on our faces. The hilarious thing is that the stamp the immigration guy said was missing on the crew list was ACTUALLY THERE, it had just been stamped in very light ink. He was extremely mad to have that pointed out to him and angrily stamped everything properly… also in very very light ink. (This will be relevant later.)

After the agricultural lady and the boat inspection, the port captain takes all of your paperwork to process it and will give you a customs paper to take to the bank. This was more administrative hell. Firstly the port captain is a sour crust of a man who gives short, unhelpful answers. Secondly the bank he sent us to (Banjercito, the national bank just down the road) refused to process the customs fee for us, stating that they don’t provide that service despite being listed on the back of the very paper they are supposed to verify as the primary processors of that fee. We literally had to run to HSBC and back (a few blocks each way) to finish paying this fee and to get back to the Port Captain’s office by 1430 when it closes. He directed us to return the next morning.

We were there again first thing to pick up our completed documents to then hop on the ferry to Cancun to complete the TIP. Again, he told us we had everything we needed and we definitely did not. The woman who processes the TIP at the Banjercito in Cancun is notorious for delighting in sensing people away for any reason, and the ferry there is not cheap.

You need all of the documents from the Port Captain with every page stamped. The Port Captain had neglected to stamp one of our pages (what is it with these guys?) which we didn’t catch until it was too late and we were already in the bank. We also discovered that the stamp that the immigration guy had put on our crew list WAS TOO LIGHT TO READ. Remember, this is the guy who initially refused to stamp the crew list because the health inspector’s stamp was too light. Apparently no ink pad in Mexico is sufficient for its intended purpose, or all of these agents are running a pool to bet who can trip up the most cruisers before they’re forced to change out their ink. It’s demonic. Anyway the TIP lady also wanted documentation of our engine serial number (like on a survey) which we would have been happy to provide but the Port Captain said we didn’t need anything else so we didn’t bring it. Also, she wants copies. Will she make them on her copy machine? No. Does she appreciate that we brought our own printer? Also no. Finally she wanted a stamped copy of the FMM, which we could not provide because the immigration official didn’t give us one. She said we could do it online, but the website didn’t work. When we printed off the form and filled it out by hand, she said she couldn’t accept it because immigration hadn’t stamped it. I’m not sure what good it would do even if immigration had stamped it, as they apparently have no stamp ink in the entire office and the very faint stamp that he had eventually and begrudgingly put on our crew list was too light for her to read and she said it wasn’t good enough.

Anyone official you ask about the TIP will give you a different answer. The government website, the health inspector, the boat inspector, the port captain, the bank official–they all provide different numbers. They also will change the number they’ve insisted is correct within the same sentence. As mathematical performance art, it’s incredible to witness. If you can complete this online 10 days before your arrival, just do that. We weren’t able to do it that way because when we left the Keys we thought we were going straight to Isla Mujeres and wouldn’t have enough of the required 10 day pre-arrival window to do it. We then got stuck for ages in the Dry Tortugas, where there’s no cell signal, waiting for weather to blow over. I’ve read that you don’t need a TIP to get a zarpe so we’ll probably just leave Mexico ASAP, skip the TIP, and never return to this shell game of a government process again.

If you’re crazy or masochistic enough to visit here, bring your own damn ink. Check every document you are handed back. Prepare to be outright lied to. If a marina offers to do your paperwork for a fee, just do that–it’s a shakedown but well worth it because the bribes get passed down the chain and everyone is happy. You cannot complete this process quickly, legally, and easily. Pick two of the three.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I have successfully completed paperwork from the USCG to leave from US to Cuban waters, an infamously difficult and lengthy process, in a fairly short and simple time. About 3 days. So when I say that it’s easier to go from the US to Cuba, a country where our government wants to do everything in its power to prevent us from visiting, rather than our closest neighbor and ally Mexico, you will understand the insanity of this process. You’ve been warned.