Edi had accepted an offer on her house on Vancouver Island, and the deal was closing, so she decided to fly back to Canada to make sure everything fell properly into place. Thankfully, the Olympics were over; our loft is adjacent to Vancouver's Olympic Village, and had she gone a week or two earlier, getting around would have been nearly impossible. She planned on spending a few days there and to run a lot of errands.
There is over five months of mail in the box, and to augment that stack, I had ordered some parts for Sequitur and a new battery for my computer. Edi had ordered another bunch of books from Amazon and she needed to buy a new battery for her computer. We had also been compiling a list of foods to buy that we cannot reasonably get down here, such as BC smoked salmon, Japanese rice crackers, extra-dark chocolate, real cheese that doesn't feel and taste like plastic.
We took the bus from La Cruz, which is in the state of Nayarit, down the twenty or so kilometres to the airport in Puerto Vallarta, which is in the state of Jalisco. We discovered that there is a time zone change between the states of Nayrit and Jalisco, the boundary between which is less than two kilometres north of the airport. This discovery took us quite a while; unbelievably, there are no clocks in the airport. There are no clocks in the ticketing area, nor any in the check-in area, nor in the departure lounges. There are no current time indications on any of the screens showing departures and arrivals. The lack of line-up for the flight, the early boarding announcements and other subtle clues eventually led us to believe our watches were wrong. Edi got on her flight and I bussed back to La Cruz.
Our water tanks were getting low, so I started making some water. I quickly discovered that the water in the anchorage off the beach in La Cruz is full of sediment. This entire corner of Banderas Bay is quite shallow, and the prevailing winds keep a rather steady surf breaking on the beaches and shoals along its northern side, churning-up sediment, which very quickly clogged the pre-filters on our watermaker. I got just under an hour on a re-cycled pair, so I replaced them with new filters, and these lasted only an hour and a half. Having made less than two-and-a-half hours of water since topping-up in Mazatlan on the 21st of February, the tanks were getting low. It was time to move.
At 0945 on Thursday the 4th of March I weighed anchor and headed southeast toward Puerto Vallarta. It was near calm, with the 2 to 3 knot airs barely rippling the surface of slow westerly swells. There were bands of cirrus making their way across from the west, foretelling a change in the weather.
It was easy to find the entrance to the port, I simply headed toward the cruise ship that was alongside. Easy, that is once I had distinguished the ship from yet another condo block. The entrance was narrow, but well-marked with buoys, and the chart was perfectly gridded to the actual lay of the land.
The entrance was straight forward for me, but apparently not for others. What appeared to be a catamaran and a sloop lay on the bottom just inside the entrance buoys. Once inside the small harbour, I turned and ran slowly northward up a long, narrow passage between boats on both sides, which were secured to a wide variety of piers, wharves and floats. There were some haul-out and repair facilities, and some moorage for pangas and the low-end charter trade. There was also a Dogpatch-like collection of liveaboards, many of which appeared to be well beyond their best-before dates.
I called Marina Vallarta several times on VHF, but they apparently weren't monitoring, so I secured temporarily to the T-end of E float, and walked up to the office to arrange for a slip. Then I moved Sequitur along a couple of rows to G float, headed down the alley and backed into a five-and-a-half meter wide slip, which took her with half-a-metre to spare on each side. The floats are wood-faced concrete with robust cleats well spaced and well fastened. My overall impression is of a clean, well-equipped and well-maintained marina. I connected to shore power and filled the water tanks.
Standing guard over the marina are large iguanas, like this fellow, which is close to a metre in length. Of course Puerto Vallarta was made famous by the iguana. In 1963 when "The Night of the Iguana" was being filmed in this area, the star of the movie, Richard Burton was having a torrid and very public affair with Elizabeth Taylor. The couple attracted large numbers of paparazzi to Puerto Vallarta, made international headlines and this soon made the sleepy little town of Puerto Vallarta world-famous. A real estate boom began and has continued with few interruptions. It has for the last several years been the fastest developing tourist area in Mexico.
Surrounding the marina is a broad malecon onto which open many restaurant patios and bars, plus the standard mix of shops offering such things as souvenirs, jewellery and women's clothing. But added to the mix here are many fishing charter operators, resort timeshare hucksters, real estate agencies and condominium sales offices. Above the shops are stacks of condominiums.
I settled-in to a routine of working on maintenance items onboard, taking strolls ashore and feeling somewhat at a loss without Edi to share my days.