January 14, 2005
Zihuatanejo, Guerrero Coast, Mexico (17o 38' N 101o 33' W)
We finally have full water tanks again, the first time since we left the dock at Puerto Vallarta. This may not seem like such a big deal to you boaters back home, but unlike you we cannot just pull up to the nearest water spigot and fill 'er up. We've been getting water from Ismael, a local who delivers water, beer, and soda to boats in the anchorage in addition to his 'regular job' of delivering water, beer and soda to Playa Las Gatas where there are no roads for delivery trucks. He's very efficient and also very reasonably priced. He'll bring as many five gallon water jugs to your boat as you want and picks up the empties after you're done transferring the water into your tanks. The problem for us is that we're not really sure how many five gallon jugs we can put in the tank at any particular time. We therefore underestimate on purpose so we don't end up with a bunch of full five gallon jugs on deck that we can't fit in the tank. Fortunately we have five empty jugs on board (we bought these in Tenacatita, actually we paid a deposit on them so we should be able to return them...) so as long as we have fewer than five jugs that won't fit we can keep the full ones around. It's very complicated. Anyway we finally got the guess right and were able to fill the tank, with three jugs left over. I put these in after a few days so we could get an idea of how much water we're using. According to my calculations we're using 7.5 gallons per day, that's for everything: showering, drinking, washing dishes, bushing teeth, washing hands... That's pretty high for us, we are normally under 4 gallons per day, but since we can't swim in the bay to bathe we have to take 'full showers' every night on the boat, hence the high usage. Any of you land dwellers want to compare how much water you use?
We've had some visitors from the States: Doug and Karis, cyber-cruisers who we met at Darwin and Mary's wedding (geez, how long ago was that?!), have a time share in Ixtapa and found our blog while searching for information on Zihuatanejo. They were very kind and brought us mail, some zincs for our prop, and some January Latitude 38s (complete w/ Linda's picture on the cover!). I guess there's more than one reason to publish on this site. We took them out for drinks at a beachside restaurant, which is cool because we don't usually go to beachside restaurants :-) and hooked up with them later in the week for Pozole Thursday (to be written up soon...). It was great to see them again and hear all about what's happening in the 'real world'.
The other night Dave and Debbie invited us over to their boat, Megabyte (a Maxum 4600 power boat), for a movie night. They have a large selection of DVDs and, best of all, Air Conditioning! We spent a blissful 100 minutes watching "O' Brother, Where Art Thou", complete with Dave and I singing many of the songs. In retrospect we should have gone for something a little longer, maybe "Gone With The Wind", and added a cartoon or two, just to be able to sit in a 76 degree room for a little while. On the up side we may have been able to convince Linda, Debbie, and Cindy to do laundry like the Sirens in the movie. Or not.
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