Logbook and Photos

Update 6 - Winter Update 2004

This is a reprint of our Winter Update 2004 sent by e-mail to friends and family.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

We wish a Happy New Year to all of you and hope you had a great Christmas season and are finally settling back into a more relaxed pace.   We spent the Christmas season in Zihuatanejo, which is a pretty bay and town and about a 100 miles north of Acapulco. The tourist side of the area is Ixtapa, which some of you may be familiar with.  Since leaving San Carlos, where we had left the boat for the summer, we have already sailed (mostly) about 875 miles south to this location and have another big leg coming up shortly as we head out of Mexico and into Central America. The latest logs on our website www.TiogaAdventures.com\log.htm, describe our inland RV trip to the Copper Canyon here in Mexico and also our boat travels this season thus far.  We are now working on our next log, which is about our one-week inland trip to Mexico City, where we just returned from last week.

We were very impressed with Mexico City.  We were careful about personal security, but never once felt threatened in any way.  We traveled there and back by deluxe bus from “Zihua” with another cruising family with kids, so with four adults and four kids we were a pretty amusing and unusual sight for the very friendly Mexicans.  The site of Mexico City was actually built by the Aztecs in the 12^th century in the middle of a huge lake in a big highland valley.  They built up the land by creating a grid of stakes driven into the shallow water and planting willows and fast growing crops on floating rafts attached to the grid.  As the crops took root, the formed extremely fertile islands (chinampas) separated by an immense canal system for commerce and thus created Tenochtitlán, the site of a city and empire so prominent that when the Europeans arrived in the 16^th century, Hernán Cortéz conquered the Aztecs and founded present day Mexico City in its ruins.  The place is dripping in rich history, culture, and archeological ruins. 

Back on the boat, within a day or two, we begin our next big passage leaving Mexico for El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama by March.  This is a particularly challenging passage, as we have to traverse through the Gulfs of Tehuantepec and Papagallo, some areas with extreme wind conditions. We will be traveling in the company of other boats and watching the weather carefully.  We’ll likely take a 2-week break in El Salvador (830nm from here and between the Tehuantepec and Papagallo) for some more inland travel, and then continue to southern Costa Rica where we’ll have cleared the Papagallo and can slow back down again into anchorage-hopping/cruising mode. We’ll transit the Panama Canal in mid-March (you may be able to watch at www.pancanal.com), and then turn north again for the northwest Caribbean countries of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba, before arriving in Florida next June.  Stay tuned for our Central American adventures!   We’ll continue to post boat position reports and comments at www.aprs.net/cgi-bin/winlink.cgi?ve6rxm. Another neat way of viewing our progress is to visit http://shiptrak.regex.ca (there may be a www in there?), however you have to enter our radio callsign VE6RXM manually.

 Adios for now!

Chris, Sheila, Joel & Gerrit Richards

s/v TIOGA

Zihuatanejo, Mexico

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