March 21, 1998-Acapulco and Beyond

Wings reached

Acapulco on Sunday the 15 of March

It is the most "city-like" city we have visited.




Broad avenues lined with palms, six lanes of traffic, high rise hotels in downtown, and hundreds upon hundreds of blue & white Volkswagen Beetle taxi cabs. They clog the intersections and curbs like a swarm of insects. They also carry any number of people. I saw them with six or eight passengers and the rear wheels splayed out at 45 degree angles.

The Gran Plaza mall is amazing with it's high gloss shopping and wonderfully complex and beautiful architecture. We ate at a fast food place there (four of us and three promptly got sick, in the cleanest looking restaurant I've eaten in in Mexico).

The movie theater was a 10 screen affair and we watched "As Good as it Gets" with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. (In English with Spanish Sub-titles).

Acapulco is in a big bay and surrounded by high hills. With white beach at the shoreline, the hotels, and the town spreading up the hills it is spectacular. It is also rich. The yacht club, which is equal in opulence to Seattle Yacht Club or St. Francis, is filled with the most expensive yachts. The also have a big racing program and a few dozen 40-50ft race boats which are dry sailed. Club de Yates de Acapulco has it's own travel lift. Of course with all this evident wealth you could anticipate that the place would be expensive to stay for a while. It is. Marina space is at a minimum and what is available is very expensive. We came in, did some shopping, picked up Joann, and headed out.

Shopping

Now we are almost to Huatulco, 225 miles to the SE.

This is a long trip for the duration of the stay we've planned, because we have to go back to Acapulco to drop off Joann in just 5 days. And it is mostly motoring due to light wind and our tight schedule, but we did have a wonderful sail all day yesterday and some the night before. Maybe we've sailed 10 hours out of 41. However, for three hours we sailed at 9kts on a tight spinnaker reach, that was fun, but we changed to a headsail because it was just too tight and it got tiring sailing on the edge.

Huatulco

We'll be back in Acapulco on the 24th and we'll be looking for a cheap way to stay there a while to do our final provisioning and boat projects before heading west to the exotic islands of French Polynesia. Acapulco has a lot of good grocery stores, including some huge warehouse stores they call "Bodegas".

There are also some USA stores like Price Club, Sam's, etc. We plan to pack Wings with a lot of food and other supplies which are reputed to be pricey in the Pacific. We'll plan to take 12 cases of Mexican beer and a case of Mexican rum. We already got a quantity of good USA canned meats (other than fish, canned meat is rare in Mexico). We will also take a couple of extra fuel cans. Well, that's it for now. Maybe if we get good cell coverage in Huatulco we'll send another message from there.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Mexico