ooooooh......La........La....!!!

La Paz to La Cruz, that is...

But first...the Flying Zuchini Brothers met Barnum and Bailey!!!  With friends Mark and Vicki we spent our last La Paz evening at the circus which was in town...Circo Rolex.  What a kick!!!  If you've never been to a Mexican circus.....well, ya don't want to miss it!  Great acrobats, miniature horses, dancing big horses, tigers jumping through fire hoops and riding on swings (no local chapters of PETA around here!!!), and hundreds of teenage girls screaming at the top of their lungs for their favorite acrobatic studs!!!  Ya gotta love it!!!  Folks even get their pictures taken with a couple of the big cats on kitty downers at the end!!!  The rascals could hardly keep their eyes open!!!  Check out the attached cheezy video for from Bravo Productions for a peek at the fun...



It was with mixed feelings that we left the Sea of Cortez, which has been our spectacular home for the past 9 months.  But other adventures are calling, and they're calling us from the south.  We had a beautiful passage from La Paz over to La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, another of our favorite towns in Mexico.  First day was a mixed bag of conditions, some sailing, some motoring, as we worked our way around to Bahia de Los Muertos.  Spent a day here, waiting with other boats for the forecasted northerly wind to fill in, as we had a roughly 350 mile passage to La Cruz ahead of us.  Well, the wind filled in as predicted.  We set the sails on a port tack shortly after leaving Muertos, and 56 hours later, we arrived, with the sails still on port tack!!!  Not a single tack or jibe in over two days!  Conditions were beautiful, with winds varying up to around 25 knots, day and night.  A bit lumpy for the first day, but once we left the Sea behind us and got into the long Pacific swells, life was good!!!

We're now in the La Cruz anchorage, along with over 60 other boats...we hear an all time record for here.  Had fun racing as crew aboard a friend's catamaran this past weekend in the Vallarta Cup series...good to get out on the race cource again after living the cruising life for the past 15 months or so.

BREAKING NEWS FLASH!!!!!

Do any of you remember the old claims to "double your horsepower while using 50% less fuel" with some mystery product of the JC Whitney Catalog???  Well, I'm here to tell you, we achieved a similar miracle aboard 'Bravo'!!!  Since putting in our new engine a couple of years ago, we've been disappointed in the speed under power.  At engine cruising RPM we'd typically run at around 5.8 knots, while similar boats with the same engine ran at nearly a whole knot quicker.  This translates most importantly to range under power, as moving 15% faster for the same RPM means that much better fuel economy.  We dialed in maximum pitch on the Vari-Prop propeller, and that was as good as it got.  When we last hauled in the US, we had the stops relocated by the manufacturer to allow more pitch.  I estimated the setting at the time, but the performance didn't improve much.  Well, when we were out of the water in La Paz, I adjusted the prop to allow nearly 2" more pitch.  (What is "pitch" you might ask???  Well, think as a propeller as a big screw as it turns, "screwing" itself through the water.  The "pitch" is the distance it would travel with one revolution.)

The results have been tremendous!  We can now motor at the same RPM as before (2400) at around 7 knots, or throttle back to 2000 RPM, using much less fuel, and still making nearly 6 knots!!  Yee hah!!  This additional range may come in handy as we work our way through the doldrums down south, or fight the Humbolt current as we head to Ecuador.


That's about all of the news for now.  We'll be back in Seattle for some business for about a week, the last week of January, before continuing our journey southward.