BACK IN MEXICO

It's  been so long since I posted to this blog, I'm just going to do a quick over-view of the highlights since my last entry, the trip to Manzanillo..

From Manzanillo, we sailed back up to Puerta Vallarta, Mazatlan and our home port, La paz. Overall, the trip north was pretty calm and uneventful.  We dropped Doug and Jan in Puerta Vallarta and between P.V. and Mazatlan, we got to rescue a sea turtle.  Poor guy was so tied up he could only swim in circles at the surface, prevented from diving by a  plastic, water-bottle buoy.

Incapacitated sea turtle, wound-up in the buoyed, polypropylene line Mexican fisherman use for long-line sets.  Once I cut the line free, he went straight down to a safer environment.

Sea Story stayed in La paz for the summer.  In April, Mary Lee flew back to Wisconsin, and I drove back a couple of weeks later. We did manage a trip up to coastal British Columbia for a couple of weeks with Doug and Jan on Snowhawke in late August.  It was another fish-food orgy; salmon, ling cod, dungeness crab and prawns to excess.

The rest of the summer was a lot of biking, visiting old friends and relatives, gardening and a couple of weeks in Sacramento.

In late October, we drove back down to La paz, stopping in Denver and Sacramento along the way.  Denver was particularly nice, with great fall color and delightfully warm weather just in advance of their first big snowfall of the season (we got out of town just a day and half before it hit!). 

The drive down Baja is a daylight-only, 1000 mile haul that takes three days to do comfortably.  Other than a couple of difficult construction detours, the paved, 2-lane road is good, if a bit narrow by U.S. standards.  Biggest dangers are not bandits, but 18-wheelers that crowd the centerline, and free-range cattle that like coming up onto the pavement after dark.  The terrain is remarkably varied, although mostly desert and rugged mountains.  There are also several agricultural regions, some which feature miles and miles of plastic tented fields of vegetable crops.

Now that we're back on Sea Story at Marina Palmira, it's time to get re-acquainted with our neighbors, the other live-aboards who inhabit dock three, our particular block in the neighborhood.  Many of us are "commuter cruisers" who leave the boats down here and spend our summers in the U.S. and Canada.  Others are year-round residents who tough out the hot summers at the dock or up in the Sea of Cortez. Still others are semi-transients on their way to or from other sailing destinations.  It makes for a nice, eclectic mix of folks who have become some of our best friends over the past few years.

Right now, there's some friendly holiday, boat decorating competition.  Sea Story has a well-earned reputation in this category, so it's back up to the foredeck to hang another string of lights. 

Happy holidays everyone....