Marina Riviera Nayarit aka Marina La Cruz organized a sail to Yelapa. It was a small flotilla of about eight sailboats. It was our first time to Yelapa.

Yelapa is on the south side of the Banderas Bay directly across from La Cruz.

We left at 1pm as we were the heaviest boat and the others departed at 1:30 and 2:00. We had a nice sail over with the wind on our beam and easy seas. It took us about four hours sailing at 4 – 6 knots.

We were told that there were mooring balls, which were managed by the restaurant named Fannies and to contact them on a certain channel. They came out to greet us in a panga boat and met us at the mooring ball. I handed them our mooring line and they looped it through the mooring line and threw it back to me to tie off and that was that.

We had been warned that the anchorage could be rolly and to set a stern anchor. When we told the panga man we wanted to set a stern anchor, he said that the water was very deep, 150 feet where we were moored but he helped us anyway. This is how we set the stern anchor….we secured 220 feet of line to our boat and the anchor and then handed the anchor to the guy on the panga boat. He took it as far as it would go towards shore and then dropped it. It was really easy, lol. It was set well enough so that it kept our bow into the swells during the night. Some of the other boats didn’t set a stern anchor and they rocked and rolled in every direction all night after the wind died. By the time we left, the anchor was hanging straight down, it had just rolled down the shore.