After a refreshing swim - it gets up into the 90's pretty quickly here - we headed to Martin's place on Friday morning. He was just blending a pitcher of banana smoothies so we joined him in sipping delicious drinks as we sat on his second floor balcony and looked through the flowers to the bay beyond - where three sailboats (including a pretty Bayfield 36 flying a big red maple leaf) sat floating gracefully. Not a bad front yard view!!

We moved Madcap over to Casey's place in the afternoon, after accepting Martin's invitation to come back in the evening for a BBQ with our cruising neighbours and some land folks. Che helped us with our lines, I did a load of laundry (it was dry within an hour) and we both had showers - yeah - a change from solar ones on the deck! No luck with internet so we napped and read.

Casey and Martin made up the land contingent in the evening (Jennifer from Gringo Bay couldn't make it) and JP from Montreal, Wolfgang and Beya from Germany and Jim and I represented the water based folks. What a wonderful evening. We feasted on homemade guacamole and salmon spread followed by BBQ chicken with a honey/rosemary marinade accompanied by taro, plantains, cole slaw, pasta salad and not one but TWO desserts - a frozen banana one and Jennifer's apple crisp. Since apples are not grown here, I wondered how she could produce this, but it's made with Malay apples. They don't look much like the ones we are used to, but they taste very much the same in a cooked dish. We sat on Martin's front deck, gazing out at the bay. The grounds were splashed with colour from wild ginger and all those tropical plants we grow inside at home. As the sky darkened, millions of stars twinkled overhead, and were echoed by dozens of fireflies twinkling through the garden. The company, the food, the scenery were superb. Thank you Martin!

After dinghying back to Casey's dock one bay over, Jim headed for bed with his book while I sat in the cockpit and listened to the pastor at the evangelical church just down the shoreline exhort his flock to repent and rejoice. I couldn't understand the language - there is a lot of Q'eqchi' (one of several Maya languages) spoken here along with Spanish - but I got the tone of Nicolas' preaching, and the rousing, almost rock style singing flooded the whole bay. We were surprised to see rows and rows of lanchas pulled up along the bank as we passed the church, but then we remembered - the water is indeed the highway around here.

We visited the little tienda (store) across the bay enjoyed another visit with Casey and then headed for the marina district of the Rio. We had no wind at all until we got here so we motored the whole way, and then anchored off El Toutugal marina in 12 - 15 knots of wind.

We'll explore the town of Fronteras, investigate some marinas for storage possibilities and see if we can't find an internet connection.