2-14-98
We arrived as planned in La Cruz...just in time to find a place to buy a
beer and watch the Super Bowl. What a blow out...at least some of the
commercials were pretty good. La Cruz is a little one street town about
20 miles north of Puerto Vallarta. The follow day we continued onto
Puerto Vallarta.
Puerto Vallarta is located in a huge bay 25 miles across, it's a lot like Monterey Bay. The Bay is lined with white sand beaches and surrounded by steep mountains. Puerto Vallarta is a huge tourist town. Hotels for miles...with more new hotels being built everywhere. It's a great town. It has preserved alot of the charm of the old Mexican town and intermixed it with all the new fancy Hotels, shops and restaurants. The town is constantly full of activity...artist in the town square, singing Mariachi bands and street vendors. We had a lot of fun just wandering around people watching...people from all over the world are vacationing and the local folks are very friendly. Lots of fun.
There is a waterfall just up a path from town. We had a great day.
We got word from Vaughn's Dad that he would be going in for surgery. So Vaughn immediately headed back to the States to see his Dad through the surgery. Sharon will follow in a few days. We will be back in the States for several weeks until we are sure Dad is back on his feet.
We made it back to Puerto Vallarta after a long long..... flight. Our flight to Dallas was seat belts "on" the whole flight, very bumpy. Then the rain hit Dallas and they shut the airport down for about an hour. This cause huge delays in flights coming and going out. Our filght was schedule out at 11:50am, we left at 5:15pm! We didn't get to Puerto Vallarta until 9:00pm. We left San Fancisco the night before at midnight. We were tired.
The boat was in good shape when we finally did get home. We just did the normal cleaning and she is looking good again.
On Sharon's birthday we rented a car (a VW convertible) and enjoyed a day of exploring. We headed up into the mountains to check out the jungle. When the paved road ran out we continued on dirt roads...crossed several creeks...but on the third creek crossing we weren't sure the old VW was going to make it so turned around and headed to the beach. We had fun...it's a beautiful area.
The second race the winds were much milder around 15 knots. It was almost dry...most of the time. We had a great race. We looked a little silly at one point...as luck would have it that one point was right near the Race Committee boat...the one with all the "Photographers". I am sure they have some beauty's of us...as we were rounding the mark heading back upwind and dowsing the Spinnaker...one the Spinnaker sheets got away from us and in a split second the Spinnaker was flopping in the wind....off the aft of the boat. (For those of you that don't sail...a Spinnaker is suppose to be flown out in front of the boat). The other sails were are trimmed correctly so we told the skipper to maintain course to windward....while all six of the crew scrambled to get the Spinnaker under control and back on the boat. Never a dull moment!
We had a huge lead heading in to the Third race. So we were able to relax a little and really enjoy the race. We sailed a perfect race, did everything right. We had a lot of laughs. We made a great team. We all will look back on the races with good memories.
With the Races finished we spent the next day getting "Reality" ready to sail again. It had been two months now that she had been tied up at the docks. We said our good byes and headed out. We had a lovely day sailing Banderas Bay. It's a truly great bay for sailing and it was great to be sailing it on our own boat again. We sailed for hours heading in for the evening to La Cruz. Had a great sail again the next day and anchored at Punta Mita at the had of Banderas bay. We spent several days at Punta Mita. Two of our racing crew friends, Gary and Jeannie, join us for a couple days on their boat Remedy. We did a day trip out to the islands of Tres Marietas. They are beautiful rugged rocky islands full of birds. Similar to Isla Isabela there were thousands of Bobbies on one island and lots of Frigets on another island. We went snorkeling, but the water visibility was terrible. You could not even see 3 feet underwater. So we explored around the island in the dingy. The islands are full of caves from being pounded by the waves. We couldn't go into any of them, to much wave action, but they sure were pretty to look at. Punta Mita has miles of beaches so we spent to next day checking out the little town and walking the beaches.
We finally left Banderas Bay and started heading back north, back to the Sea of Cortez. We had another wonderful day of sailing. We covered 50 miles. The coast line was beautiful, green mountains and white beaches. We sailed until 9pm and anchored in Mantanchen Bay.
We spent a couple of days at Mantanchen Bay which is right near the town of San Blas. We went on a Jungle Tour it was wonderful. The tour is in little ponga boats that take you for a couple hour ride up the river. The river weaves through thick Mangroves tunnels. We saw all kinds of different birds: white cranes, egrets, herons, comerants and lots of other birds that we have no idea what they are named. One bird, that was kind of like an owl, blended in so well with the tree trunk that even with the guide pointing right at it, it took us several minutes to actually see it. The jungle was beautiful with tons of ferns and orchids. All kinds of different plants and trees. We saw lots of turtles, a few iguanas and even a couple crocodiles!
