05-02, Wed – 05-08, Tuesday La Cruz to Mazatlan

I have to apologize. Blogspot has made changes and I cannot get the text to have paragraphs. Stupid!!

Bye Bye La Cruz! We left harbor on Wed. late morning and anchored out at the Punta de Mita anchorage which is just inside the Banderas Bay. This took 2 hours off our trip to Chacala the next day. I baked some muffins and we had a nice dinner relaxing. It was, however, quite rolly in the anchorage, so not terribly comfortable. Oh well! Just for a night.

We talked to our friends who live in a condo there since we were right in front of their place.

We got up the next morning and weighed anchor. It was a BEAUTIFUL Sunrise! There was no wind, so we motored the whole way. We spotted one whale and a pod of dolfins along the way. We were quite surprised there was still a whale left down here. It took us around 8 hours to get to Chacala and it was just as charming as we remembered. We had the anchorage all to ourselves. Just another one-night stay though, so we did not go to shore.

We weighed anchor at 8:00 a.m. expecting a 24 to 26 hour trip. There have been no winds to speak of, and what little there was came straight off the bow. So it has been all motoring. The trip up was uneventful, except that Tristan (or cat) has suddenly quit eating. We’ve known he has been displaying the early signs of kidney failure, but he is suddenly showing the end signs. We were hoping it may just be a little case of sea sickness at this point. (Tami was off-watch sleeping and missed the big lightning storm that struck about 25 mile in front of us – too far away to more than barely hear the thunder but quite a light show – D) We arrived the next day in Mazatlan, Stone Island Anchorage at 7:00 a.m. (we actually got there earlier and had to wait an hour for sunrise to enter the anchorage – D). It is lovely here. We had to have our favorite Garlic Shrimp pizza at Benji’s Pizza and say hello to our friends there. We got to see the new baby, which was still in the oven in December. We had our friend Nick out to the boat for some cold ones. Still keeping an eye on Tristan hoping he will eat. He is drinking, but not showing any sign of eating yet.

It was the night of the Super full moon and it was a beautiful moonrise. That night, someone tried to steal our dinghy and motor, which was tied to Journey and cable-locked as well. Dick had heard from some folks that had been there not too long ago who had their dinghy and motor stolen there, so we were vigilant and locked it up. Thank goodness, because the robber cut the bow line and then found that it was cabled to the boat. Dick says it looked like they tried to cut the cable, but they were unable. So we found the dinghy floating with only the cable holding it to the boat. We found out that a person can get $30,000 pesos for a 5 HP engine; ours is a 9.9 HP worth even more! Whew!! Our friends at Benji’s phoned the police to report it for us, in hopes that they will patrol that area more. Once word gets out about this kind of thing, the cruisers will stay away. We didn’t go to San Blas this year because a couple people had their dinghies stolen there. With no change in Tristan’s eating and the fact that he is getting weaker and weaker, we decided to go to the Mazatlan Marina and look for a vet. We are both pretty upset about it, as you can imagine. We arrived at the marina on Monday and took the bus into town to talk to a very nice Veterinarian, Dr. Raphael. He was very nice, but told us there is basically nothing we can do at this point. He gave us a syringe to try to give Tristan pedia lite water and baby food. We tried that and he doesn’t want anything to do with it. He is still drinking water this Tuesday morning. He is me-yowling occasionally his discomfort, but is pretty much quiet and resting. We are keeping him as comfortable as possible for the time being and giving him much love. We are now wrestling with the decision of when to put him to sleep. Lots of tears and sadness as you can imagine. We are waiting here in Mazatlan until that time. Will keep you posted. It will be in the low 80’s here today and humid. We checked the weather in La Paz, which is our next destination, and it is in the low 90’s. Yikes! Headed for heat…