This is the first large city that we have come to since Mazatlan. Now we able to get to a cybercafe and check our hotmail. Thanks to those of you mailing us and keeping in touch. This is an interesting place. We motored into Las Hadas after spending a wonderful night in a remote anchorage at the north end of the bay. Las Hadas was quite the vacation place for the rich a famous some years ago. It is where the movie "10" was filmed, so was very popular. After spending some time at the new resort in Barra de Navidad, Hotel Las Hadas was showing its age. The harbor charges $28/night US to med tie in the harbor and $8 US/night to anchor and use the facilities. A bit steep for us, but we paid for two nights. The fee includes the checkin/checkout process, so it isn't that bad. We also heard that the Harbormaster could point us towards a place to make us a new gooseneck that connects the mast and boom. Eduardo was able to do better than that, he got the plans from us and sent them to Colima with his mechanic to have the new part made. So we were free the rest of the day to go check email. I am anxious to see how the part comes out and also the cost. Since it isn't going to be ready for a few days we looked around for ways to pass the time. That wasn't hard to do. We did a couple of shopping trips and the local Comercial Mexicana super store and got signed up for a time share presentation. We figured that we had to do at least one of these while we were here. They would even give us half price on a tour to Colima and the Volcanoes that we wanted to do.
1/9/99
We get up early to meet the taxi to Hotel Sierra where the time share presentation would be. After a nice breakfast buffet we got to see the hotel grounds a 2 bedroom studio before we were attacked by the boss. He was there to tell us there was no other way for us to vacation, this was the best deal going, etc etc. Unfortunately we weren't really interested at this point in our lives. Being somewhat of a poor sport, he dropped the ball and walked away leaving us to find our way to the lobby to pick up our gift and get a taxi back to Las Hadas. That left a sour taste in our mouths. They did a good job of the presentation, but didn't wrap things up well. That's Ok, we like our boating lifestyle. Just to see if we were missing anything that afternoon we motored the boat around the point and anchored in the nice bay right in front of Hotel Sierra. Our conclusion was that they played weird music, had too many jet skis, banana boat rides and para sailors.
1/10/99
Spent the morning snorkeling but didn't find anything tasty for lunch. We were fed up with all the noise and wakes of the jet skis so moved around the next point thinking that the resort had ruined a nice little bay. I hope that we can enjoy other pristine bays before they are all built up with resorts like Hotel Sierra.
So here's a first as we reanchored around the point from Hotel Sierra our CQR 35 anchor didn't catch. Even though we had enough scope out we could feel it sliding along the bottom when we went to set it. I suspect that we tried to anchor on a plate of rock with nothing for the anchor to latch onto. There were similar bottom surfaces that we had seen earlier while snorkeling. So up comes the anchor and we move closer to the beach for a sandy bottom.
I have been getting weatherfaxes using the HF radio, some free software and the computer. Now I need to start studying them and a book I have so that understand what kind of weather we can look forward to. Once outside the US you get to play weatherman gathering information from Ham nets like the Chubasco net, your barometer, Weatherfax, hearsay from the other boaters and what you see outside. Once you have all this information you get to make your own forecast. Like the professionals, sometimes it's correct and other times it's wrong. I keep learning.
Todd and Ellen Mandeville
S/V "Mandolin" - Cal 34
svmandolin@hotmail.com
www.aljian.com/mandolin
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