Leaving Zihuatenejo, almost

Isla Grande

When you've stayed in one place as long as we have--a month and a half--it takes a while to get ready for sea again. Kay made several reprovisioning runs to the Commercial, the Safeway-like supermarket. We had a local man clean Kavenga's rather severely fouled bottom--lots of soft marine growth as well as a pretty good case of barnacles. When he came up and got in our dinghy, dozens of tiny crabs, baby lobsters and little fish fell out of his dive gear and into the bottom of the dink. We basically had our own aquarium.

Steve did all the usual engine checks and maintenance. We took our papers to the Port Captain's office and cleared out for Puerto Vallarta. While Kay did one last load of laundry, Steve got on the internet one more time to check our land-based email and to get the latest news on the Seattle Mariners.

So, yesterday morning we were all set to leave. Rather than take off on a longer run up the coast we decided to just go seven miles north to Isla Grande, a tourist island just off of the resort town of Ixtapa. Our first evening there we listened to the weather forecast and learned that a trough of low pressure would be moving down the coast as we went north, which meant that we would likely run into strong headwinds before we could reach the next port of any size--Manzanillo.

We talked it over and decided that we'd just as soon not bash into headwinds and seas, and that if we were going to get stuck someplace before Manzanillo, the best place to be stuck would be Zihuatenejo.

So, unless things change dramatically overnight, we will be heading back down to Zihua tomorrow to wait for this trough to slide south. We'll have to go see the Port Captain and hope that he won't make us clear back in and out again ($32 and a bit of a bureaucratic hassle).

Things could be worse. Now Kay is thinking that if she isn't able to watch the Academy Awards this coming Sunday, she'll at least be able to check out the results on the internet the next day.