Tomorrow morning we will finally be leaving Maria Riviera Nayarit (in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Bahía de Banderas) a few days later than we’d hoped. We had a bit of a snafu with trying to wire some money to buy a dinghy and neither our bank nor the merchant’s bank telling either one of us that it had failed so on the last day it could have possibly gone through we finally found out that someone at the banks had known about the failure for some time but not notified any of us and we took a bus down to pay the somewhat higher credit card price for the dinghy so we could have it delivered to us from the store in PV this morning. Some good news is that the exchange rate was slightly better this week so the extra credit card cost wasn’t too much.

The dinghy is something we’d put off doing for a long time. While our little roll-up is great for calm anchorages and for easily stowing underneath, it can leave us stuck on the boat in rougher conditions or needing to time good surf to get on and off the beach. We settled on an AB aluminum dinghy because the only place in the area selling new dinghies only sells ABs and the more we researched it, the more we liked it. So far the only negative we can see is the way the oars attach to the dinghy might make for a slightly less smooth rowing experience than the Achilles line has, but the aluminum and hte weight is really great. It fits upside down on the bow of the boat just as well as our old roll-up did and we’d realized most boats are not putting their dinghy below and we should just get used to having a way to secure her up top even in the roughest conditions. So there we are. Sold the old dinghy to someone who was in need of any dinghy given how hard to come by and expensive they can be in Mexico. If you know you want a different dinghy, don’t wait until Mexico to find it. Or if you do, get it done in Baja because you’ll be paying someone to drive your choice of dinghy to you from the states….

So where to next? Tomorrow we will wake up with the sound of the rockets they are setting off early each morning for 10 days as part of the La Santa Cruz patron saint celebration here and leave the marina to head back north to Ensenada de Matanchén. Probably rest there for two nights then probably back to Isla la Piedra outside Mazatlán where we will prepare to cross back over to the eastern side of the Baja peninsula, this time with plans to head to La Paz and then to more locations in the Sea of Cortez. We have reservations at a marina in San Carlos starting July 1st. We will see if we can bear the heat until then or not. Up in the Sea of Cortez we will have a lot less internet access than we have lately, so you might be able to better follow along by going to the “Where is Pasargada?” link and viewing our PredictWind tracker where we post short updates via our IridiumGo satellite.

Enjoy some photos from Monday night’s parade in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. It was followed by music until about 3 AM which drove some of our friends to head north from the marina as soon as they could so they could sleep better. Mexico really knows how to party all night and a festival like this is a way to keep it going for 10 nights!