We are no longer a bird friendly zone. Our single hitch-hiker must have let his buddies know about his free ride, by yesterday afternoon we had three birds perched on our front bow rail. Two of these guys seemed to be young fellows. We all went forward to have a photo op with the birds and these young guys looked at us with such quizzical expressions. None of the birds were particularly afraid of us. By this morning there were five birds perched on the rail and inspection of the area showed that they were not cleaning up after themselves. So we pushed them all off with the broom and put a flag in the front flag holder to flap and scare them away.
The water was a bit lumpy this morning, pushing us around a bit more than usual, about a 3 foot chop on a 6 ft swell. It is much warmer now, 27 degrees and we have 16 to 18 knots of wind. Our location is 12.09.935 N and 115.09.144 W Our partner boat had a stabilizer issue during the night, but luckily for them, it returned to normal function. Stabilizers are like the side fins on a fish and work to keep the boat from rolling side to side. In my experience, a very vital piece of equipment for comfortable travel. Oso Blanco also caught a large Marlin fish that they did photos of and video of before releasing him. We will save our fishing activities until after the equator. We did have a freighter pass through our 12 mile radar range yesterday. Kind of a thrill to see another boat. We have been running from the upper fly bridge during the afternoons, it's pretty comfortable. The tricky part now is to make sure that we check where we are going and what the boat is doing on occasion as it is easy to just leave the operations to the auto pilot.
Back track time. So when we got the boat back to La Cruz (Puerto Vallarta) we went home to Calgary for 12 days. When we got back to P.V. we started provisioning. Taxi fares are outrageous in this area so we rented a car. Glen makes a very convincing Mexican driver. La Cruz is a very traditional little town with a big new marina. There a handful of restaurants, some of them very good - Black Forest and Friscati's. We met up with Oso Blanco people. Glen and I had met Eric previously in Taiwan when we were there to see our boat being built, so it was now very nice to meet his wife Anne and their son Bear. We had a couple of strategy meetings with them, trading boat info and shopping info, all in an effort to both be ready for take-off. By Mar 29, both boats had been moved to the Paradise Village Marina in preparation for clearing out of Mexico. There is one tiny problem - it is Holy Week here in Mexico and the day we want to leave the Port Captain's office is closed and our boat cannot clear the day before as John come in on the late afternoon flight, after closing hours for the day. Now the Port Captain will not be open until Tuesday April 6th (which if it had played that way, we would be leaving today!!!!!) Anyway, the very good thing about Mexico is that where there is a will, there is a way, this is where Juan the "Paper Guy" comes in and he got us cleared on Apr 1 in the morning for our departure later that afternoon. Now we are current with all events, unless I choose to remember interesting snippets.
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