Mazatlán is a city with much to do, whether you're here during the slow summer months, or the faster-paced autumn and winter months. There are plenty of city guides and online travel sites that describe all there is in Maz and the surrounding area, but here are some of the excursions we made this past…
Rick was originally a Category 5 hurricane but had fortunately decreased to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in Mazatlán in the early morning hours on October 21, 2009. Here at Marina El Cid, we experienced a few hours of very heavy rain on Rick's leading edge; had a short period of…
The Fox spent 6 full weeks on the hard, the longest it has ever been out of the water. Most of this time was spent waiting for parts to be shipped from various elsewheres. The Total Yacht Works team of mechanics took our Yanmar 4-JH3 all apart, cleaned it, buffed out the salt water damage,…
We returned to Mazatlán late this past summer, not only to hide somewhere for potentially the worst part of hurricane season, but also to visit the fine mechanics at Total Yacht Works. They'd done work for us before and the timing of our return coincided nicely with Yanmar's recommended 2000-hour engine maintenance, so we decided…
Please forgive any factual inaccuracies or omissions in what I am about to relate. This is complicated stuff and I'm an idiot. In the Lake Pátzcuaro region of Mexico's central highlands live a loosely affiliated group of indigenous tribes collectively called the Purépecha (aka "the visitors"). We've heard that the Purépecha (or….maybe it was the…
One of the reasons we don't have a land-house is, my dwelling preferences are unrealistic. I am most comfortable looking up at 14-foot ceilings and beams made out of whole trees; stepping lightly upon floors of hand-made tile, and caressing 2-foot-thick walls of adobe. Passing beneath hand-carved stone arches with finely-executed artistic appointments are a…
So, we'd bused it from Mazatlán to Morelia and had a great time. We rented a car in Morelia, the better to tour Pátzcuaro and its nearby lake. Late August is the off-season and we pretty much had the whole district to ourselves for the 4 days we were there. If you can find your…
One of the many advantages of using Mazatlán as a summer cruising destination is the ease of inland travel. Maz summers are oppressively hot and humid, giving incentive to travel to the drier, cooler climes of the central highlands. Last summer we'd bused from Maz to San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato (still my favorite…
We arrived in Mazatlán on July 31, 2009, technically 2-1/2 months after the start of hurricane season. From our own experiences and from what we heard from other long-term cruisers during the summer of 2008, most of the tropical storms and other strong weather events don't get active this far north in the Eastern Pacific…
Once we passed the upper-Baja drift net and entered the port of Santa Rosalía we had a grand time seeing cruising friends again, and meeting new ones. Most cruisers in Santa Rosalía in July were making their way north; only The Fox and a very few others were going south, ever mindful of the summertime…