BlueJacket's 2012 Cruising Schedule

Friday, March 2, 2012

027-55.350 N
110-53.171 W

Ahoy from the crew of the BlueJacket!

Yes, it's that time of the year again when you get to receive exciting newsletters from us. Soon we'll be headed back to Guaymas, Mexico where BlueJacket has patiently been waiting for us since last July. We've had a great time while we've been home. Probably the most notable events were both of my parents turning 90 and they're doing well. Sue has been very busy with a non-profit named Furnishing Options which provides free furniture and household goods to to people who don't have the resources to obtain them. Both Sue & I had a great skiing season, despite Mother Nature not lending much of a hand, but I guess that it's time to trade frozen water for liquid water to play on.

The web site kept me quite busy as I've added quite a bit of functionality to it. One of the cool things that I added was an image location map to my photo albums. When you're looking at a photo you'll see an icon that looks like a globe under the photo. If you click on that, a map will appear showing you where the image was taken.

The major piece of work that I did on the web site was adding an Interactive Weather Map. This map allows you to view weather from a large variety of sources by clicking on a map. For the US you can view the National Weather Service text forecasts, look at radar or satellite images, get tide information and view all of the NOAA weather charts. Internationally you can get forecasts from World Weather Online, Wunderground and Windfinder. Additionally you can obtain the graphical weather charts from Weather Online as well as from the Australian, UK, German, Singapore, Fiji and Tahiti metorological bureaus. You can also download GRIB files from SailDocs. Finally you can create your own personal markers to to indicate areas of interest by right clicking on the map. All in all it's a pretty cool system, if I must say so myself.

We decided that we're going to spend a second year in the Sea of Cortez. The original plan had us zipping down the coast to Panama, but if we did that we wouldn't have much time to explore the area. It's not like it's in our back yard, so we decided to take our time. The plan right now is to get the boat ready, head across the Sea of Cortez to the Baja, work our way down to the La Paz area and then cross back over to Mazatlan on the mainland. Then I think that we'll work our way down to Puerto Vallarta (PV) and then we'll work our way back to Mazatlan where we'll store the boat for hurricane season.

One of the "interesting" things has been trying to figure out where to store the boat for the next hurricane season. I've been absolutely astounded by the marina pricing in the PV area, it's 4-6 times what we were paying in Rhode Island and I always considered RI to be expensive relative to elsewhere. The only thing that I can figure out is that there are too many rich gringos from CA who have their boats down there and who are used to paying CA prices. It's just ridiculous! Right now our plan is to leave the boat on the hard in Mazatlan, which is a less than ideal location, but is $2-3K less than PV.

We'll be departing for Mexico on Tuesday, March 6th and due to flight schedules, we get to spend the night in Phoenix. On Wednesday we'll fly to Hermosillo and then drive 75 miles south to Guaymas. Not exactly the most direct route we've taken.

Our plans are to cruise until mid-June and be back before the really hot weather arrives in July. If we don't get to see you before we leave, have a great rest of the winter and spring!

-- Geoff & Sue

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Log ID: 1473