We're back on the boat in La Paz. We left Christchurch last Thursday (wake-up call at 0330 for a 0645 flight to Sydney); hung around Sydney Airport for 7 hours; flew to LA; hung around LAX for 5 hours; then flew to San Jose del Cabo, where, thankfully we had booked a hotel for the night. By the time we arrived in San Jose we had been travelling for 37 hours. Needless to say we slept like the dead that night before catching the bus for the three hour trip to La Paz.

We plan to do some provisioning then get away on Wednesday for Puerto Vallarta via a short stop over in Los Muertos (Cove of the Dead in Spanish - recently renamed to Cove of Dreams so the American developers can sell off all the blocks of land they have subdivided and have on the market for $1m + each) so I can clean the bottom of the hull. I went over yesterday to clean the prop but the water was too murky to do the rest of the boat, therefore the stop over before making the crossing to PV. We had a bit of excitement in the marina yesterday when a giant squid (1.4 meters LOA) swam in and decided to entertain the troops for a while. It didn't seem too concerned about kids bending down to scratch its back, but it did spend quite a bit of time bumping into the rocks around the edge of the marina before someone came along with a fish net, scooped it up and carried it back over to the ocean to set it free.

Because we are now leaving the comfort of marinas, getting to Internet cafes will become a little harder so access to Hotmail will be limited. Therefore, if you would like to contact us please email us on the boat: vjn3067@sailmail.com
We'll be updating the blog at regular intervals (we can do this remotely from the boat) and most updates will have a position report - particularly when we are at sea, so that our progress can be followed by clicking on the link. For those with access to Google Earth, when you open the Position Map you can click on the link to GE and zoom in on the actual picture of where we are. This feature is really neat when we are anchored in a little bay, but it obviously doesn't have a lot going for it when we are in the middle of the ocean unless you like looking at a picture of a lot of blue water.

By the way the photograph above was taken at the start of the Ha-Ha moments before we got the spinnaker up (that's me on the foredeck playing with the spinnaker bag).