La Cruz and Chamela

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

La Cruz de Huanacaxtle is a small town at the north end of the Bahía de Banderas, or Banderas Bay. It has a good anchorage and a marina. We dropped anchor on December 18 and rowed in to check out the marina and town. The dinghy dock here is expensive – 80 pesos a day, but on occasion you can tie up without paying if the security guys are otherwise engaged. The town has a very nice fish market, a tortilleria where you can get warm fresh tortillas for 9 pesos per half kilo, and some small grocery stores where you can buy basics. A half kilo of medium large shrimp can be bought at the fish market for 100 pesos (figure about 18 pesos per dollar).

La Cruz has restaurants, condos to rent, whale watching excursions, an amazing Sunday market, and gringos everywhere. But there is no ATM or bank in La Cruz. For that you have to go to the next town, Bucerias, or into Puerto Vallarta on the south end of the bay. A combi ride to Bucerias is 12 pesos each and takes maybe 20 minutes. For 24 pesos each you can ride the bus into Puerto Vallarta and depending on where you go, that can take 45 minutes to over an hour. We did discover early on that all stops, or paradas, are not equal. You can’t assume that just because you got off at one place that the return stop would be just across the street.

• 

• 

One of our early adventures was the afternoon the dinghy decided to escape. It was not tied as securely as it should have been and Bill looked up to see it drifting out the bay. Luckily a panga was going nearby, so Nina frantically waved her arms, discovered she still has a decent taxi whistle and got their attention. Dinghy rescued! Hooray for the panga fishermen!

We have coined the phrase “wild google chase” – just because google says it’s there doesn’t mean it is. So far it’s been true for banks, bookstores, and outboard motor shops and we strongly suspect more. Bill researched the locations of about six places he thought we could look at outboard motors. It was time. We do like to row, but rowing half an hour in the heat to get in to a dock is a very different experience than rowing half an hour in the Pacific Northwest. It was time to track down a 2 horsepower engine, about as much as our dinghy could handle. We’d talked about an electric motor, but they are twice as expensive, they have to be charged, and no one down here sells them. Zaragosa, PV’s version of West Marine had a 3.3 Mercury, but nothing smaller. The Suziki dealer turned out to sell cars and pointed roughly in the direction of where the outboard store was but was not more specific. The marine store by Marina Vallarta sold outboard parts but not motors. We caught another combi and headed over to Las Glorias to the Yamaha dealer. It didn’t look like much – a small storefront filled with boxes of outboard oil, a foot high concrete sill to step over and a small customer window that was closed. It popped open. Enough English was spoken that, yes, they did sell outboards, and yes, they did have a 2 horse in stock, would we like to look at it? Should we buy it? We decided, yes, which turned out to be a good thing. It would take a couple of days for the transaction to clear and they would then deliver the motor to La Cruz. One last stop, Star Marine. No longer there, which was when we coined the phrase wild google chase. We now have an outboard, and we are quite enjoying it.

• 

• 

Why La Cruz? There’s always something going on. The marina has a full calendar of activities from yoga to Spanish classes to weekly free movies, to guest speakers, to kids activities and so on. We have been happy to participate. The Christmas Eve potluck was fun and we got to meet some new folks. We’ve done a movie night, heard Jeanne Socrates speak about her circumnavigations twice (she holds the record for a solo, unassisted, non-stop circumavigation and she was 77 when she did it). We got to hear Jamie and Behan Gifford from Totem speak several times. They have spent the last ten years circumnavigating with their three children. As one fellow cruiser said, when you hear them at a boat show, most of the audience is wannabees, here we’ve all actually set off in one way or another. We are also a 30-45 minute bus ride from Puerto Vallarta, so there are lots of options.

Outside of PV is the Jardín Botánico de Vallarta. We were invited to go by Tom and Annie from Tappan Zee, who we had met in La Paz, and we were joined by Marshall from Tenacity. We caught an early bus into PV and had the ride of our lives. Bus drivers are paid by the passenger rather than an hourly rate, so the more runs per day the better. Apparently the driver decided that it was a competitive driving day. He managed to keep it just this side of a bus demolition derby. There were locals with their phones on video recording the very close calls with other buses. We were all grateful to arrive in one piece. Annie was studying her Spanish during the ride and missed most of the drama. It took us two more buses to get to the garden and thankfully both rides were both mellow. The garden – think Buchart Gardens gone tropical with orchids, hummingbirds (at least three kinds), a river to swim in, and all kinds of butterflies everywhere. It’s gorgeous. On the way back, Nina got to check off a travel bucket list item – riding on a chicken bus. The bus from the garden was a nice tour bus, but she kept hearing bird chirps somewhere in the bus. Maybe birds had flown into the bus and were roosting in the luggage rack. Finally, looking across the aisle, a row back she spotted a bag that was moving. It had several chicks in it peeping away. It was a pretty deluxe chicken bus, but a chicken bus nonetheless.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Sunday market. French Bakery. Vegan ice cream shop. Whales in the bay. New friends. Meeting friends of friends. And then we were off again. After nearly four weeks in La Cruz, we headed south to Bahía Chamela. We rounded Cabo Corrientes, the point where Mexico starts to swing east, during the night. The wind picked up more than the predicted but other than being rolly, it wasn’t a bad ride.

Chamela is a beautiful bay. We spent a couple of days in the bay just off the town of Pérula and then a couple of days in the islands. Bill got in some snorkeling and saw some colorful fish and sea stars. His other snorkeling was to begin scraping off the barnacles on the bottom of the boat. We’d had the bottom cleaned by a diver while we were in La Cruz but it was starting grow already. And things do grow quickly here. The first night off of Isla Pajarera we were treated to a fantastic lightning show over the mainland mountains that lasted two hours.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Next stop, Bahía Tenacatita.