We apologize for not posting anything in a month, but we have been very busy. We hope to catch up soon, as we have two road trips to discuss, a return trip to the US for my father's 92nd birthday, an exciting midnight sail through a severe thunderstorm, and an upcoming four-day regatta that starts March 4.

While a seven-month leave of absence seemed absurdly long at the beginning, it is rapidly coming to a close and we are on a tight schedule to get back home.

More soon, we hope...

I realize we haven't posted in a long while, and we are actively trying to catch up. We have been busy this past week participating in the Zihuatanejo Sail Festival, which is a charity event raising money to build schools in the surrounding area. I'm sure we'll retroactively post about this, but for now we'll skip ahead to today.

Tomorrow we plan to rent a car and travel inland to see the monarch butterflies. Every year the little butterflies somehow manage to fly thousands of miles from Canada and the US to a mountain valley in Mexico, where they hang by the millions from trees awaiting winter to end in the US so they can return north. It's a world heritage site.

After four months of living on a boat, we are looking forward to having an air conditioned car and going to a hotel for three nights with a stationary queen-sized bed and toilet, and a real shower. We're quite looking forward to this. The doggies are coming too, because we found a nice B&B that takes pets very near the main square in a town called Potzcuaro, which is supposed to be a beautiful colonial town on an inland lake in the Mexican highlands. It's about a four hour drive from here.

We plan to bring our SPOT transponder with us, so if you see our path heading inland that is why. Also, if we get kidnapped by narcos, please tell the authorities where we are!

We left the Las Hadas anchorage adjacent to Manzanillo in Santiago Bay at 8AM January 29th bound for Isla Ixtapa, which is 182 miles down the coast of Mexico. We expected to arrive at our destination the following afternoon.

For the most part, the trip involved a lot of motoring in little wind, but we did have four hours of afternoon breeze in the 7 to 9 knot range that allowed us to sail between 6 and 7 knots. With about a knot of favorable current, we were able to average a bit over 7.5 knots over ground for those four hours, which sped us down the coast. Such is sailing in Mexico.

The plus side to having no wind is that the seas are fairly smooth. The big excitement was that right after sunrise on our second day at sea we encountered a huge pod of dolphins that sailed along with us for several miles. And by huge I mean thousands of dolphins, stretched as far as we could see either side of our boat, with a dozen or so riding directly off our bow. The attached photo is a still shot extracted from an underwater movie I took using the GoPro camera that my work colleagues purchased for me as a going away gift. I attached the camera to a boat hook, and dropped it in the water at our bow as we were motoring along. When I am able to upload the entire video to you tube, I will post the link to it here.

We always love it when dolphins follow along with us. This time they chose to do so in the clear waters in the Bahia de Petacalco, which made for a great video.

We arrived at Isla Ixtapa around noon, dropped anchor, and got some needed rest.

We left Barra de Navidad, and managed to sail all of the way down to Santiago Bay, albeit in light winds of 8 +/- 1 knots or so. Still, with a spinnaker, we were making anywhere from 5 to 6.5 knots of boat speed depending on whether the wind was 7 or 9 knots. It was a nice calm sail.

We anchored in Santiago Bay with another half dozen boats. We went to shore the first full day there, with the dogs, and took the advice of fellow cruisers to go down the beach toward the end, where it is calmer, to land our dinghy. That worked well; we walked the dogs for an hour, then stopped at a Palapa restaurant for beers and grilled red snapper before returning to the boat. It was a Saturday, and the beach was packed with Mexicans out for a nice day.

Sunday was overcast and rainy, and we quite enjoyed that. It meant we didn't have the need to do too much other than read. But I put in a couple hours cleaning the bottom of Joyride. After the last couple times I did this, I learned to 1) put on a rash guard, and 2) start at the front of the boat and work backwards. The reason this matters is the boat is covered in little crab critters that don't like being displaced. The last time I did this I swear they were irate and took their revenge by clinging to me and biting me. So the rash guard gave me a layer of protection, and by starting at the bow, the current carried them away as I cleaned. It worked.

Not so exciting, I hear you say.

On the third day we decided our agenda was to walk the doggies, snorkel on the sunken ship in the bay, and barbecue a dinner. Easy enough. We began by walking the dogs, which involved a dinghy trip to shore, and this time we took the shortest route to shore, rather than landing where we landed before. Jenn was not happy with the idea, because some of the breakers were fairly large. I countered that we needed some excitement in our life, and we could wait for the large sets to go and go in on a lull.

That's an excellent plan, but not one so easily executed. Despite Jenn's nay saying, I decided we'd be fine. We hung out just outside the surf break, looking back for small swells, and when I thought it was time, I committed.

The technique, as told to me more theoretically than practically, is to power in on the back side of a wave, ride it in behind the froth to the beach, then when the water recedes you step out onto dry land. I told a fellow cruiser this theory, and he adamantly agreed, but said it was only half the story. "Once the wave recedes, everyone gets the ____ out of the dinghy, grabs it, and runs like hell pulling it up the beach before the next wave gets you!" I agreed with his modified version of the theory of landing dinghies in surf.

As for practicing the theory, a few days ago when we landed on the surf in La Manzanilla in Velella's dinghy, it didn't go too well. Doug, the driver, asked "What is the theory?" and I said you gun it when the wave passes beneath you. He gunned it on the front of the wave, later saying he didn't think his 18 HP outboard would start as fast as it did, and there we were on the front of the wave rather than the back. We flew into shore, stern high in the water, bow pointing down, until we rammed the shoreline. Jenn went flying, the rest of us managed to hold on, but we were beached, and nothing flipped.

OK, that wasn't so bad. Back to Santiago Bay and my dinghy approach. Having watched the waves for a while, and determined none were too bad, I committed to one. No sooner did I do this than I saw the wave peaking up behind me, and I knew it wasn't good. I tried taking the gas off the dinghy, hoping the wave might roll under us before it broke, but that didn't look promising and I chickened out and decided to gun it in the hopes of running in ahead of it. That didn't work.

How big are these swells, you must be thinking? Not very big at all. Like maybe a half foot. It's amazing how little of a swell it takes to cause large problems in a little dinghy. The big problem is that when the small swell hits the shoreline, it peaks up into a wave of maybe 3 feet. Our dinghy is about a foot above the water, so three feet is relatively huge.

What happened next is that I gunned it, and the wave caught up. Now our stern is three feet in the air, our bow is pointed down, and it was all over. Wipeout! The dinghy flipped, and all four of us -- Jenn, myself, and dogs Harvey and Phoebe -- were ejected into the water, "ass over tits," to quote a British saying that's quite apt here. As I was going into the surf, with ass and dinghy now above me, upside down and coming my way, all I remember was pulling the "emergency off" tether to stop the engine. The biggest danger, after getting hit by the 80 pound motor, is to have it be running still with the prop chewing up flesh. So I did one thing right, by cutting power to the outboard.

I was thrown into the surf, and don't recall much else. I came up, and Jenn was struggling to stand up, the dinghy was upside down, I was on my side in the receding surf, and fortunately our two dogs in their life jackets were clawing their way up to the dry beach. Jenn's comment: "Don't even talk to me right now! Don't!" "Well," I said, "we had excitement in our life."

Although full of sand, the outboard actually started again, which really surprised me. We made it back safely to the boat, and hosed off the people, dogs, and outboard. It was time for snorkeling, and Jenn was talking again.

Jenn wanted to paddle our borrowed Stand Up Paddleboard (SUP) the 600 yards over to the wreck, and I wanted to take the dinghy. She told me she'd paddle me on the SUP if I just sat down, so we tried. Our weight on the board made for a semi-submerged trip, and after about five minutes we'd made it about 70 feet, so I said this will never work. She told me "We need some excitement in our lives, so we should continue." Alright, fair enough. I didn't have too many bargaining chips. But it wasn't going well, so I opted to get off, and swam over, with her paddling nearby.

The 300-foot steel ship San Luciano sank in the bay in a Category 5 hurricane, and is now there partially submerged having formed a nice bank. The picture above is of this wreck, and all the life now clinging to or around it.

Today we depart this beautiful marina at Isla Navidad to continue south. We'll spend about a week 20-30 miles from here in several bays around Manzanillo. Then we plan to do an overnight passage to get the 200 miles down to Zihuatanejo, where we've signed up for a charity event that benefits local children in early February.

This is also where we say good bye to many new and old friends, since they are turning around here. We hope to meet most of them in a month back up in Banderas Bay. Many other boats will continue the trip south with us too. So, we are not alone.

This was the view of the Marina in Barra taken from Joyride's cockpit. It's been a great place to visit in between our two week-long anchoring trips, as it affords us a place for some R&R, dogs get a greats walks, and there are two towns for re-provisioning (grocery shopping). We also all got haircuts recently too - Harvey, Phoebe, Jim and myself. This time I did not cut Jim's hair he joined me at Celia's. We'll post a photo of our $3 hair cuts next.....

The distance from our last anchorage (Cuastecomate) to Barra is only about 4 miles, so we figured we'd sail even if the winds were very light. They were, as usual, and we drifted towards Barra at anywhere from 1 to 2 knots -- so what if it took us a few hours? We eventually made it, and on route we heard on the radio from Sailor's Run that Elvis would be making an appearance that night in a local bar. OK, we had a plan for the evening now.

We had earlier agreed to meet up with Velella for dinner that night, so we called them on the radio and agreed to eat early so we could go see Elvis later. Velella barbecued a great dinner for us, which was very nice.

Eight of us (Velella, us, Sailor's Run, and another cruising couple) met up at the bar around 8pm. Velella's idea of drinks apparently involves four shots of booze served with other inert ingredients in giant hard-plastic solo cups, so the night was off to a tipsy start before Elvis entered the building. I know two of the stories on this blog involve alcohol now (and curiously the boat Velella) but honestly, we don't actually drink that much and these stories are aberrations. But I was the "Commodore of Vice" for that evening -- which is what Vice Commodores are often called at yacht clubs. And yes, I am the VC of our yacht club -- I'm just working remotely.

Elvis took the stage, and he was pretty good, especially considering we're in a small town of a couple thousand people. A group of nine men, aged 60 and up, took the next table in the bar, and since we all wondered what their story was, Jenn was appointed to ask. It turns out they all take a week off work and come down here from Canada to golf. They've been doing this every year for the past 15 years. Jenn got many of them on the dance floor, prompting one older man to say "You lucky bastard!" to me as he was whisked off to the dance floor. Jenn and I danced too.

It was a memorable night.