Thursday, March 31st Happy Birthday Dennis! We left Mazatlan's Stone Harbor at 0300 as planned. About 1030 we had a couple of humpback whale sightings; the first was just about 50 yards ahead and crossing our bow. It looked like a mother and its calf (one was a lot smaller than the other and they were going very slowly). We were motoring at the time and had to slow down to avoid hitting them. The second sighting was another one doing the tail-slapping routine that we'd seen before. At about 1330 a northwesterly filled in and we sailed with the spinnaker up all afternoon. Dennis got his birthday wish. We anchored on the east side of Isla Isabella and there were already four boats in a pretty small anchorage. This anchorage on Isla Isabella is a little open with only a large rock separating it from the island for protection from the north. In addition, the bottom is mostly rocks with only an occasional sandy spot. We broke out the anchor marker buoy/trip line for the first time in case we hooked a rock. It was blowing about 20 knots by the time we dropped the anchor but the swell was knocked down by the rock outcropping. By the time the sun set, two more boats had arrived and seven of us shared the little anchorage. We enjoyed barbequed fish for dinner.

Friday, April 1st we dinghied to the south end of the island and hiked. Isla Isabella is known as the Mexican Galapagos because of all the exotic wildlife. We saw green, brown, and blue-footed boobies, nesting frigates, iguanas, lizards, and a crater lake. We took both cameras with us so we have lots of photos to sort through for posting on the web. Some of the booby chicks looked larger than the guarding parent. There were so many of them that they would roost on or near the trail and as you got close squawking parents would send out a warning. The colored feet were so brilliant, especially the blue ones. The frigates were everywhere - hundreds in the sky, hundreds in tree-top nests - they were there in great numbers. It was quite a sight. We only saw one pair of iguanas sunning themselves. When we got back to Libertad, Christian from s/v Altair offered us some of the yellowtail that he had speared and already fileted. We readily accepted and gave him a chunk of our watermelon in return. Virginia baked banana bread and Dennis rigged screens for the hatches and installed two fans as we head to San Blas tomorrow and we are told that mosquitoes and no-see-ums are common around sunset/sunrise. We went over to visit Joyce and Scott on Life is Good for happy hour and had a nice chat about how we each got started in boating, how we chose our boats, the training we had, and our experiences with the "Captain Ron" that we each hired at one point. Although we had docked next to them in Ventura for months, we hadn't had a chance to really visit (remember that house remodel we were doing....).

Saturday, April 2nd Mexico switches to daylight savings time tonight/early tomorrow morning. A few days later we will be moving into the Central Time zone when we get to Puerto Vallarta so we will be changing our clocks a lot this week. We left Isla Isabella just after the pangas cleared the fishing nets they had set around our boat the previous night. We are right behind Life is Good as we head to Matanchen Bay just outside San Blas. It's very calm and we are motoring so Dennis took advantage of this time to pull everything out of the cockpit storage areas in search of our Velcro that he wanted to use for screens over the larger hatches. No matter how detailed we think we have made our inventory we keep identifying things that are missing from the list and require an extensive search. Bummer.

Sunday, April 3rd we went with Joyce and Scott on the La Tovara Springs jungle tour up a river just behind our anchorage. A panga takes you up the river/estuary and stops whenever you see something you want to look at further or photo. The guide also spotted a few things for us that we wouldn't have noticed. Hopefully the pictures can capture the beauty of all the various birds we saw. We also saw turtles and American crocodiles. It was quite a pleasant cruise through the mangroves in the early morning and we didn't have a problem with bugs. At the furthest point, is Tovara Spring where you can swim (in an area fenced off from the crocodiles) and enjoy a lunch or early dinner at the restaurant located there. We had worn our swim suits in anticipation of a dip, but the morning was cool and the restaurant wasn't open yet, so we just headed back. We were now more trained observers and had even more sightings of wildlife on the return trip.

We wanted to explore the town of San Blas. Joyce and Scott took a taxi. Dennis really wanted to dinghy the four miles. The trip over was relatively calm but four miles is a long way by dinghy; the wind had increased in the afternoon for our return trip and Virginia had a few white-knuckle moments as we surfed the downwind swells. But Dennis was quick to learn how to make the most of the following seas and we had a quick trip back. While in town we walked up to the fort (La Contaduria) and the charred remains of their original church/mission (Templo de la Virgin del Rosario). Amazingly the floor of red Mexican tiles was completely intact and looked beautiful amidst the ruins. We also toured the open market; we can never pass those up. It is so interesting to see the types of food and methods of preparation and presentation and we often need fresh produce. Since it was Sunday the post office, auto parts, and hardware stores were closed so those errands had to wait. We toured the central plaza to see the intricate bead work for which the Huichol women in San Blas are famous. We had lunch in town. It was the first time that we had so much trouble communicating our order. They didn't have langosta (lobster) items on the menu, however they had some on display and were really pushing them that day. Dennis was going to order an omelet with shrimp (camarone) but since they were offering lobster, he asked them to make it a langosta omelet instead. They looked at him like he must be very confused. They pulled him out of his seat and took him over to see what a langosta was, held one up for me to see, and appeared to be asking us how the heck they could fit a BBQ'd lobster in an omelet. We resorted to two items that were on the menu and graciously declined the lobster. That afternoon Joyce and Scott came over to Libertad for a visit and we enjoyed cold drinks and snacks out in the cockpit, listening to music from one of the beach restaurants. As the sun began to set, the mosquitoes and no-see-ums started to come out so they headed back to Life is Good; we closed up Libertad and watched a movie down below with the fans and screened hatches keeping us quite comfortable. We later discovered that while we were safe from the bugs on the boat, during the tour of the fort and the church, we had picked up quite a few bites -should have applied some repellent!

Monday April 4th Happy Birthday to Virginia's brother Danny! We did some chores in the early morning, changing engine oil and making an adapter for filters we found at the Home Depot in Mazatlan, to fit our watermaker. We've discovered that as the sea becomes warmer, the filters need to be changed and cleaned more regularly as they fill up with rapidly growing organisms. So we needed to increase our inventory of filters to rotate them more frequently. Our next stop, Chacala, is only a 24 mile trip so we delayed our departure hoping to get some afternoon wind (you are probably tired of hearing that from us). We left around noon and sailed the whole way. We also caught two yellowtail! Both rods went off at the same time so we had a flurry of activity as we eased the sails to slow the boat and reeled in both fish. We had both fish sitting on the back swim step, where Dennis installed the fileting board, as we reset the sails and got back on course. During that time one fish slipped away. But the remaining one was plenty for us. The anchorage in Chacala, is exposed to the swell and the wind is variable, so it can be quite rolly. Everyone was using bow and stern anchors to keep their boats pointed into the swell, so we did likewise. We have Channel Islands experience at placing two anchors, but that included an event of dragging the stern anchor in heavy swell, so our stern anchor is now a bit of a monster along with about 30 feet of chain making it always an adventure to deploy. Using the dinghy to drop the stern anchor we ran out about two hundred feet of rode -after hauling down on the stern rode, we were locked in good and tight. We then took the dinghy ashore and walked along the beach to the palapa restaurants to have a cold drink. We looked over at the table next to us and recognized Ed and Annette from Windsong. We had contacted them via email about 9 months before we left to ask about the tools the used for their website, as we were impressed with the gps track snippets and such. They mentioned that they were in Mexico but headed home for a few months and home happened to be in Oxnard; we agreed to try and get together for dinner. We were having a hard time finding a date with the busy schedules we both had. It turned out they were planning their wedding and they invited us to attend! It was such a pleasant surprise, but we did indeed attend it at one of the yacht clubs in Channel Islands Harbor and finally got to meet them. We approached their table at the restaurant on the beach in Chacala and reintroduced ourselves. They invited us to sit at their table with Jim and Lucy from Passage II (a Hunter) who are also from Ventura/Channel Islands. Ed and Annette have a new boat - Songbird (an Island Packet). We talked until sunset and then dinghied back to our boats as the bugs began to come out again.

Tuesday, April 5th we were the very last of 7 boats to leave the Chacala anchorage. That gave us lots of room to pick up our stern anchor using the windless. Much better than Dennis having to haul it in manually, albeit a bit more complicated. Headed for Banderas Bay, around lunchtime we saw a turtle floating in the water. Banderas Bay is the largest bay in mainland Mexico and very famous for its good sailing conditions -lots of wind and minimal swell -sort of like SF bay. So as we rounded the northern point, Punta Mita, and headed into the bay, we got about 17 knots of wind. Although Punta Mita and the Tres Mariettas islands at the northern end of the bay were enticing, we decided to go straight to La Cruz. We anchored in 17-20 knots in the La Cruz anchorage. There was some chop but no swell so it was comfortable; wind died down later in the evening and we had a gorgeous sunset. We ate the yellowtail we had caught the previous day - delicious. There were about 20 other boats with us in the anchorage - one power, the rest sail boats.

Wednesday, April 6th Happy Birthday to Virginia's sister Susan! We moved on to a marina in Nueva Vallarta as it would be centrally located between La Cruz and Puerta Vallarta with convenient buses between them. We are at the Marina Nueva Vallarta. It evidently was in disrepair for a number of years and they are now fixing it up and offering great rates as an enticement. So far we like it. We have some great neighbors and one has a car and already offered to take us anywhere we need to go. We dinghied over to Paradise Village Resort and Marina, which is right next door, to check out the market, laundry facilities, etc. and have lunch. We plan to stay here about three days to get caught up on our internet work, do some laundry, and reprovision...along with sight-seeing of course.