Long time, no updates - we're ashamed! Here is input from the both of us!
From Janet:
22 December
I just strung up the Christmas lights on the mast (again!). What inspired me
is that someone has been playing Christmas carols on channel 22 on the VHF radio
(which is normally the hailing channel). Eric is still in town. This afternoon
he was helping to clear rocks off of the dingy Landing Beach. This is important
for us as we don't have wheels on the dingy and he drags it over rocks all the
time. About 10 people were involved in this effort. We should only been here a
couple more days, but of course it's good for the community. I just noticed
another boat that had strung up Christmas lights!! I didn't notice it before.
Speaking of how long we should be here, depending on how closely you've been
following, you may remember we were hoping to be out of this area by Christmas,
but it turns out the folks that were going to bring us some parts on 12/20
aren't coming. Instead our parts should arrive on Christmas Eve and we hope to
pick them up on the 26th.
30 December
Sorry to everyone about the long lapse without an update! Hope everyone had a merry Christmas! We spent Christmas here in La Cruz at anchor. We honored our second annual tradition of watching Christmas specials in between opening our presents to each other. Rudolph, followed by a Charlie Brown Christmas and how the Grinch stole Christmas. From Eric I received a soccer ball and pump (yay!), harmonica lessons and music which he downloaded before we left Seattle, and a bracelet made by the Huichol that has turkeys on it. He says he got it because turkeys are especially revered in their culture, and also because I am a turkey. I love my presents. I got him some spicy ramen that I brought from home, some cologne that he was almost out of, a necklace that I found here, and some handmade beer cozies that have our boat name and web site embroidered into them (please see photo section for pictures of all the presents).
Wanting a special Christmas dinner for the two of us, we splurged and purchased two lobsters and some steak. A restaurant worker recommended a meat market to us, so we went to check it out. It didn't have any nice refrigerated display cases, just a couple big guys chopping up meat but we decided to go for it and asked them for a couple steaks. We don't know anything about cuts of meat. So the guy just chopped off a slab from what ever he was cutting at that time, but it looked okay to us and it was only three bucks so what the heck. I wanted to take pictures of the butchers but thought that would be pretty dorky.
Then we went to the fish market which has been recommended by other cruisers.
The fish monger was cutting up this enormous piece of tuna when we arrived, and
it looked fantastic. We just wanted to pop it right in our mouths with a little
soy sauce and wasabi. The fish guy didn't really speak English, so beyond asking
for lobsters, we didn't really know how to ask for tails versus whole, fresh
versus frozen etc. I knew how to say "is it dead?" But that really didn't seem
appropriate. We finally got our lobsters and they were about 1 1/2 pounds each,
whole. $20 total -- not too bad. They were frozen. They are spiny lobsters which
means they are covered with huge thorns! Well we went back to the boat and began
trying to figure out how to cook our meal. Eric was working on the steaks and
the barbecue (which we had not used yet) and I started thinking about our
lobsters. We didn't really have a pot big enough for them, so I really had to
shove them in there.. I defrosted them partially and cooked them for about 10
minutes, everything turned out great and we had a super meal!
A couple days before Christmas, we took the bus to the next town over, called
Bucerias. We ate a late breakfast at a beach side restaurant called Karen's,
strolled through the market, and just enjoyed a day away from the boat. A couple
days after Christmas, we took the bus all the way back into Nuevo Vallarta to
the Paradise Village marina where we spent our first six weeks or so., picked up
our new life jackets/harnesses and portable GPS. The people who ended up
bringing our stuff down were in the marina at some point, but we couldn't find
them to thank them personally so perhaps they had moved on. We passed out to
some of our old friends pieces of a pineapple cake that I had baked the previous
evening. We only saw James from Gitana and Mick & Barb from Navigator Seattle.
They had gone home before Christmas and were telling us about all the power
outages in the Seattle area. Al and Nancy were back in Canada and Kim & Jorge
were not around either. Time traveler (Rick & Geny) was out of its slip so we
were disappointed to miss them... but as luck would have it, that night we went
back to La Cruz and had dinner at the English pub (fish and chips Yum!), and we
saw them sitting at Philo's on the way home! So we had a couple beers with them
and enjoyed the music, and made plans for the following morning for coffee and
pineapple cake on their boat. Rick's son Chris was visiting and he was a really
cool biker dude. He has biked around Kenya and spent some time in India also.
From me:
We saw quite the interesting site today. Someone got on the radio and said they saw a sailboat they thought might be drifting out of anchorage. Others confirmed it and within a very short time there were at least four dinghies headed out for the drifting boat. We were ready to jump in ours with any needed gear and waited to find out if they needed more help. Turns out that the couple on board were taking a nap (yeah, right!) with the generator on and had no idea that they dragged their anchor! They then came around to all the boats in the anchorage here (in La Cruz still) to thank people in person. Quite a scary thing to see a boat drifting off, but it was great to see the helpful response of the other cruisers!!
I should mention that we saw our first whale the other day, it was only ~50 feet away from the boat at its closest. First we saw a dolphin jumping, and then all of a sudden we saw the big waterspout from the blowhole of the whale he was swimming next to, quite cool!
So we are finally getting out of the bay (we hope)! After I post this in town, we plan on sailing up to Punta de Mita (less than 10 miles away) and overnight there. Then early tomorrow morning (fiveish?) we plan to head south, around Cabo Corrientes and then on to Ipala which will hopefully be a nice small quaint little place to bring in the New Year!
We hope to start doing more posts via SSB so stay tuned to that page. Also, any comments you post on that section will be made public (assuming I figure out how to do that today!)
Okay that's all for today as I want to get this posted and then get ready for our first real cruise!