Leaving Tomorrow

We hope to be heading to the port captains office tomorrow in Neuave Vallarta and then head out to sea Saturday morning. We will head to 5degN 130degW for first waypoint or until we loose the trade winds and then we will head due South to get through the Doldrums as fast as possible(an area known for no wind, fickle winds and squalls and lighing storms) until we pickup the SE trades, cross the Equator and then straight to Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas. Is 3000 miles and expect to be about 1 month getting there.
Not sure if any internet access there may have to get to our next stop Hiva Ova for that.
Got my haircut today, laundry and last minute Veggies. We went out for dinner tonight up stairs in the marina restarant with a super view of the harbor. Can feel dock rot setting in, time to get out to sea before we forget how to sail.

Fianl Countdown

Picked up Dorothy at airport Monday, she was loaded down with goodies for the boat and some bars we like that you can not get down here. The boat is ready to go now, just got to top of the main water tank soon and a bit more provisioning. We need basic food for 3 months, as there is no good stores until we get to Tahiti. The Marqueses have some stores but we hear they are pretty basic and not much of the stuff that travels well on a boat.
Finally got the chartplotter/radar unit working again with the display unit Dorothy brought back. On Friday we are hoping to do our check out at Neuvo Vallarta. We will go the 5 or 6 miles up there and tie up at port captain dock and checkout with him and apparently he will call the customs officer down do finish the clearance and then we are issued our Zarpe which we need for the next country we visit. Went out for dinner last night with the crew of Demelza.

Two weeks to go

We have less than 2 weeks before we head off to French polenysia in the South Pacific. Dorothy just left for Toronto, and I am doing some boat chores and a couple of small changes in the boat. Several people in the marina here have already left and a few more over the next few days are headed to French Poly.
Most of the time we get around the PV area by riding the buses which run frequent and are cheap. The main buses into PV often have someone come on board who entertains the passengers by singing and playing music or sometimes someone in a clowns outfit comes and tells funny things, I guess as we don't understand spanish but see other passengers laughing. Then off course they walk down the bus trying to collect a peso or two of each passenger.
The drivers are very fast and aggressive, you have to be careful going to your seat or you will go flying. They come to jerky stops and full acceleration from the bus stop.
I went to a food provisioning seminar last night one of the cruisers put on. Got a few tips on what foods last the longest and info like that. Those doing the 3000 mile jump to French Poly are doing what is called the Puddle Jump and there is a Yahoo groups website for the puddle jumpers with lots of good info and downloads, and here at La Cruz they have pot lucks and seminars for the Puddle Jumpers. This is the safest time of year to do the puddle jump, Mar and April to avoid the hurricanes up here and the cyclones down south.
They are having a big boat show here at the Marina and have spruced up the area for it and done a lot of work getting ready for it. Today is the last day of it. It is not nearly as good as our boat shows back home. Us marina tenants have to where arm bands to get in and out of town to our boat until the boat show is over.

Boat Haulout

We had seaweed starting to grow all around the boat so decided we better haul the boat and get bottom painted. The boat yard here at La Cruz was very expensive, so we went the nine miles South to PV and the boat yard there was one third the price and also let you sleep on the boat where the other place did not. We hauled out on Saturday morning and I put on 2 coats of bottom paint which had been difficult to find especially in red.

Also changed the zincs since the boat was out and we were back in the water Monday morning, and back in La Cruz marina just after lunch.

Dorothy got some provisioning done at some different stores in the PV area. Met another Canadian couple from Calgary on Demelza who are also heading down to French Polynesia. Quite the coincidence, their son lives at Tagish Lake in the Yukon.

We are definitely not in as good physical shape as when we left Vancouver. We get lots of walking in but it is not safe to cycle around here and no hills to hike up, so I have started to do a bit of jogging.

Beach at Chamela

Papaya orchard

Crocodiles

Tsunami warning

Forgot to mention that shortly after we left our anchorage at Chamela to head North we heard there was a tsunami warning for most of the pacific and that boats should immediately head out to sea. So we steered abit further out as water was only 120 ft deep 2 miles offshore. I figured 200 to 300 ft should be ok unless it was a monster. We could hear on the radio that most of the boats had headed out to sea from the last two places we had been, some went up to 7 miles out to sea. By 2pm the warning was over. The tsunami warning was because of the 8.5 earthquake off Chile.
Later we heard that the marina that we are in now had a 1 meter surge as the water level rose up and down several times and there was a strong current flow at the entrance that almost threw one boat on the rocks as it tryed to leave. Most boats stayed put here, I think they got the warning to late.