Pic of office and restaurant at the newly finished La Cruz Marina

We moved into a "real " slip today and saw Hermy and Jack from IWA at one of the buoys in their dinghy waving hello. The marina is absolutely beautiful. When we were here during Christmas of 2007 on our way south. this marina was not officially open yet. We got a slip but it had less than 10 boats in the marina. It was still under construction. This is clearly the nicest marina we have ever been in. There are big doings this month. There are boat races all of this month, several from this marina and several from Puerto Vallarta. All of them in this bay, Banderas Bay. The President of Mexico, President Calderon will be here at this marina to give the Cup winners their trophies this week. There are lots and lots of military people, Navy, Marines, Army. They are all carrying rifles slung over their shoulders and some at the ready. There also is a big Boat Show at the marina for 5 days. There must be almost 300 boats in the slips. There are very few open slips. We were lucky to just show up and get in. There are a lot of things going on. We wandered around the village Huanacaxtle and it is all cleaned up and freshly painted around the town square and it really looks nice. It's funny what a visit of the President of Mexico will do for motivation. There were fire works late at night initiating and finishing the boat show.

Hermy and Jack from s/v IWA stopped over to say hi, we chatted and got caught up on the latest. We gave the boat the first good wash in a long time. Pat cleaned all along the water line a couple of weeks ago and she did a great job, it looks really nice. I spent a couple of days trying to track down a radio problem. The VHF doesn't get as good reception as it should and a radio guy came to the boat and checked it out and then we took the radio up to his house for him to check it out and it was fine. So I have been trying to trouble shoot the problem but I don't seem to be getting anywhere. It will be one on those on and off trouble shooting until I find it. I spent another day fixing some file problems on my computer. Somehow they got moved around and paths are all screwed up. I had to reset the paths on most of my programs so they can be accessed by the icons on the desktop. Pain in the butt. Pat has been cleaning the boat inside and polishing the stainless steel on the outside. We have been in town provisioning as usual and getting parts. We have been seeing some of our friends as they come into the marina. They have a pot luck dinner every Friday night so we get to meet other cruisers. This area (Puerto Vallarta) is a good jumping off point to head to the South Pacific they refer this gathering at this time of the year to be a Puddle Jump. There are a lot of cruisers here and seminars on off shore sailing, provisioning, weather conditions for the journey and what to expect. Starting from here is considered the best point of sail across the Pacific.

We saw our friends on s/v Cirque, Laura and Lewis. Lewis did well in the races and received some trophies. They came down on the 2007 Baja Ha Ha with us. We haven't seen them since February of 2008. We went down to old town in Puerto Vallarta and spent the day sightseeing along the Malacon and had lunch at a nice little Cuban restaurant. It had just opened a couple of weeks earlier. Our friends from Gato Go stopped by our boat and we had a few drinks in the cockpit and got caught up with what is happening in Harbor Island West Marina and our other friends there.

We plan on leaving La Cruz later this week and head up to Chacala and anchor there for a few days.