Las Hadas - Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico

The crew of the BlueJacket wishes you a hearty "Ahoy!" from Manzanillo!

When you last heard from us we were in Playa Boquita in Santiago bay, which is just 5 miles north of here. People kept telling us about how wonderful the the Las Hadas resort was, so about a week ago we pulled up the anchor and headed there.

For those of you who have just started reading my blogs, you would think that all that we do is move from one marina or resort to another. This year that seems to be true, but if you've been a long time reader, you realize how unusual this has been. We've never been anywhere like this section of Mexican coastline where it seems that many of the more sheltered and popular anchorages have marinas and/or resorts located in them. After 14+ years of hanging on an anchor in remote locations, it's quite nice to be able to take advantage of these amenities. And we also realize that these luxuries are coming to an end when we depart Las Hadas.

When we arrived at Las Hadas we were the only boat at anchor. There were 3 other boats on moorings, but no other cruisers. This is a far cry from the photo in the cruising guide showing 15 boats packed in here. Las Hadas certainly stands out as most of the buildings in the area are brilliant white. There's a huge condo complex in which none of the units are the same. It looks like a Mediterranean village perched on a hillside where all of the houses were organically built by individual owners with varying tastes.

 

 

Then there's the Las Hadas resort, which looks like something out of an Arabian Nights dream. The vast majority of the buildings have amazing architectural features that one just doesn't expect to find in Mexico. Unfortunately my architectural vocabulary isn't sufficient to describe the structures that top many of the buildings, but it's just really cool! On many of the buildings you'll find gargoyles adorning the roofs as well as interesting spirals and curly things. (Don't you love my precise descriptions!) The entire facility is dominated by a huge water tower which reminds me of an elongated olive sea shell. It's lit at night and is just beautiful.

What I find amazing is that the resort will allow you to use their facilities, but they charge $200 pesos (USD $16) per day per boat. That's a great deal, but we were able to pay for 4 days and get 7, which brought it down to $9 per day! Some cruisers complain about this, but I think that they need to get a clue and/or a job. Most places wouldn't even let you on their grounds! For this fee you get to use all of their facilities, pool towels and discounts at their bars and restaurants and use their dinghy dock. What a deal!

We would typically spend the morning doing boat projects or explore the area and then go into the resort at around 3 PM to read and swim. I certainly have no complaints.

One of the nice things about being here is that a local bus stops right at entrance to the resort. For $7 pesos you can get a ride right down town to the main shopping area where there's a nice mall, Starbucks, KFC, Dairy Queen (we stopped there), Walmart and a large grocery store. I 've been very impressed with how clean the city and the streets are. Once that power plant switches to all natural gas, it'll be a very nice place to stop.

We've been here longer than planned as the weather forecasts have been consistently underestimating the winds by about 10 kts. Believe me, there's a huge difference between 15-20 kts and 25-30 kts! We had friends from s/v Ashika depart about a week ago with forecasts of 9-12 kts and they didn't see anything less than 15 kts with gusts to 25 and had a rough ride.

Based upon the forecasts, we're going to head out of here on Friday and make a 190 mile run to Zihuantanejo, which at best will take us about 28 hours. My plan right now is to leave before sunrise (which isn't until 7:45) and arrive at Bahia de Maruata (which is pretty much an open roadstead) before sunset to see if that's a viable anchorage. If it is, we'll stop for the night. If it isn't we'll just continue moving along and arrive the following morning. If we spent the night we'll arrive at Isla Grande and anchor in the dark.

This concludes our tour of Mexican marinas and resorts. We hope that you enjoyed it. We did...

-- Geoff & Sue

P.S. Photos from Las Hadas are located here.

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For the cruiser:

We anchored in about 25' over sand at N19-06.090 W104-20.700. There's room for quite a few boats here with reasonable protection from the swell, but the closer that you are to the S, the lower the swell (see photo below).

The marina is a med-moor system. According to what I read, there are bow pick-up lines installed with white or orange balls on them that you can use. One boat that we know dropped their anchor, but I'd worry about it fouling. Prices seem to be about $0.68/ft with discounts for multi-day stays.

The dinghy dock is in the NW corner of the marina. The harbor master's office is west of that. If you don't pay their fee, you're not supposed to use the dinghy dock during the day. You are allowed to use it at night for free to visit the restuarants.

The marina bathrooms were scary. Don't plan on using them. They're located at far end of the walk that goes along the stores/restaurants.

Much nicer bathrooms, a wonderful pool and an OK restaurant are hidden up some decrepit stairs at the same end of the marina as their bathrooms. Look for a set of stairs leading to a black door (photo on right) and go up them. The pool that you see to the left is located there!

As stated above, the daily rate for using the facilities is $200 pesos/day, but it appears that you can get multi-day discounts. We were here off-season, so that may have had something to do with our discount.

The #8 bus stops at the top of the road which goes to the marina. It runs on a regular basis and will drop you off right downtown by the shopping district, which you will easily recognize. You can take a taxi to/from the shopping district for 50 pesos.

The Mego grocery store has a very good fruit and vegetable sale on Wednesdays. The Walmart and the Soriana grocery store have a less popular sale on Tuesdays.

The marina charges for WiFi, but there's a strong signal from the Dolphin hotel. Have a good meal at the Paradise restaurant and get the WiFi code and you should be all set. The service regularly crashed during the weekend when lots of people were using it, but off-peak it was fine.

There's a DUI laundry near the SuperMini which is located amongst the other shops/restaurants along the marina. Tokens were USD $5 per load and the dries didn't work.

Poco Pazzo is the Italian restaurant located on the N end of the marina. They have good pizza, but I wouldn't recommend them for much more than that.

Bistro Marina is located next to Poco Pazzo and is owned by the same people who own the Oasis restaurant in Santiago bar. It's certainly more expensive than Poco Pazzo, but it provided one of the better meals that we've had on this trip.