Oh where to start! First, we’re sorry if you’ve been waiting to see some updates. We’ve been busy but in the same spot in Paradise Village, Neuvo Vallarta. It feels like we haven’t been sailing much lately but we have been exploring the area around us in our dinghy and did some traveling outside of Mexico.
We explored the marina and estuary here and discovered a 7-8 foot Crocodile lives about 135 yards from our slip. We took this picture quickly from our dinghy and quickly left the area. Being in an inflatable dinghy did not feel very safe next to this guy. Needless to say, we won’t be swimming off the boat in this area!
It’s really getting to be hot so we ventured out in Banderas Bay for the breeze and visited an old fishing village, Yelapa. It was a little underwhelming when we were there but we’d like to go back sometime and explore the waterfalls. We made our way to Las Animas and anchored the boat and we hiked on the beach and up on the hillside above the bay. We passed someone’s small glass office on a cliff. What a beautiful view!
The most fun recent activity was a trip to Trinidad and Tobago for our nephew, Matt’s wedding. It was a vacation within the adventure we’ve been having on the boat. We went snorkeling and took a tour of Tobago and enjoyed the beautiful beaches. We experienced a tropical rainstorm that filled the streets and instantly showed why the gutters are so deep. Even the plane trips were an adventure. We missed a flight in Dallas and that caused a cascading series of re-routes that eventually had us flying to New York to finally get to Trinidad a day late.
We are now back on the Boat with a white-board list of things to do before we can button up our home-away-from-home for about 5 months and return to the Seattle area. Storm season is upon us and unlike the Pacific Northwest, where it is starting to get warm, here it’s really humid and it’s starting to become cloudy in the afternoons. This will eventually turn rainy, and thunderstorms will become common. In July the hurricane season starts in the tropics, too. We have about 4 days now to get a long list of hot weather and/or storm preparations taken care of to leave the boat. This morning we took the head-sail down and then put it in a cart and took it to a grassy area to re-fold it before putting it away in the sail-locker at the front of the boat. While we’ve been storing things inside, we’ve hired a crew to polish and wax the boat. There has been a crew of 3 working on the boat for 5 days. Maybe it was dirtier then we thought…. We would NEVER have had the time or desire to do all that polishing.
When we do leave here we’ll suspend the blog and we should be able to pick back up when we return in October. Stay tuned or mark your calendar and hopefully we’ll see you in person before then!
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