Barra de Navidad

In early June, we celebrated Due West’s 40th birthday! We purchased her when she was 10 years old, and are forever grateful to our friend Kate-Kate who put us in touch with the former owner Frank, and for the way that everything in the universe aligned to bring Due West into our lives six months…

Adios Barra… it’s been real! Has it really been 2+ years?! My, how the pandemic made time fly! If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you know we had a visit to Barra de Navidad in our sights well before we left Seattle in 2015. So many of our cruising friends had been…

A BIG HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who donated money to our Barra De Navidad Cruise-in-Week Flamingo Regatta FUNdraising race for the local schools, which we participated in, in February. The event was a huge success thanks to many of you! First a little background on the regatta and how we’ve been involved the…

Our dear friends Laura & Will joined us again for more adventures in Mexico. We had hoped to take them out sailing, but Due West was preoccupied getting ready for the Flamingo Regatta, and not quite sail-ready for their visit. Laura and Heidi worked together many moons ago (30+!) We’ve all been fast friends since,…

Happy New Year from Barra de Navidad! Our recent post Feliz Navidad de Barra de Navidad brought you up to speed on the pre-Christmas festivities in this town named Christmas. But we must have been really good last year cuz Santa brought us a treat! Christmas morning, rather than snow, we woke up to this……

For the last several years we have joined the Panama Posse Rally. The Panama Posse is a cruising rally for sailors traveling the waters of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.  Even though we have yet to leave Mexico, by being members of the Panama Posse each year, we get significant discounts on moorage and…

Since before we left Seattle we had always planned to spend Christmas in Barra de Navidad, translated: “ Christmas Bar” (bar meaning a river delta sandbar not a watering hole!) We had heard wonderful things about Barra and their Christmas decorations and celebrations from cruising friends for many years. And Christmas is Kirk’s favorite holiday.…

As much as we love tropical Mexico, you’re always taking your chances living in the tropics during hurricane season— which used to run June through October. But due to evolving climate change affecting seawater temperatures and weather patterns, it now extends from May through November, more than half the year. Yikes! Historically, Pacific Coast Mexico has…

Apologies for the recent radio silence. Somehow life has gotten in the way of blogging, including both of us having unexpected eye surgeries in the past few months. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet… when we last wrote, we were getting ready to participate in Barra’s Cruise-In week including fundraising, school and library…

It’s been a minute since our last post… So what have we and Due West been up to lately? For starters, we’re getting ready to FUNd RACE in the Barra de Navidad Cruise-In Sailboat Regatta on February 26, and we’d like your help! While Heidi’s spent the past two months studying night and day for…

As this crazy year, 2020, comes to a close, we hope you’re staying WELL and still finding ways to have FUN and enjoy LIFE while socially distancing. We are grateful for Zoom and our Internet connection to be able to keep in touch with family and friends. And we’re grateful for being able to socially-isolate…

So yes, Kirk needed more of his favorite coffee, but that wasn’t the main reason for our road trip to Puerto Vallarta. While it’s a two-day sail away, it’s only about a 4-5 hour car ride—depending on the number of stops for photos of roadside attractions—like designer bus stops out in the middle of nowhere,…

We often get asked, “What exactly do you DO all day in paradise?” Well, if you’re thinking hammocks and rum drinks by the pool all day long, it’s NOT that. Our days probably look a lot like yours… maybe minus the palm trees? Sunrise over Marina Isla de Navidad starts the day. After the VHF…

Wow, this crazy 2020 year just keeps on getting crazier. With another month to go in the official “hurricane season” (ending Nov. 30), we are HOPEFUL that we don’t get more storms this year. But we’re staying humble cuz we don’t want to jinx it. Hurricane Genevieve passed near by in August (along with three…

What a long, strange summer it’s been…and it’s only mid-July! How are you dealing with the COVID-craziness, protests, rallies, and summer heatwaves? We hope you are staying WELL. We are still “Sheltering in Paraiso“, hunkered down in Barra de Navidad, about 150 miles south of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We arrived here in late February, thinking…

Crazy times we’re living in. How are things where you are? Things are changing by the day or by the hour in Mexico. The government is finally getting serious about this pandemic. The country is basically on “shelter-in-place” orders now, just in time to STOP the revelers of Semana Santa (Easter Week) from a mass ascension…

We are certainly living in interesting times… Hoping you and your loved ones are safe and well amidst all the COVID-19 craziness going on around the globe. As we write this, we have dear friends who’ve been trying to get back to the US from Italy for over a week, another friend trying to get…

Wahoo, we have finally arrived in Barra de Navidad, the elusive town we’ve been trying to visit for the past four years! Barra de Navidad is only a three- to four-hour drive south of Puerto Vallarta, but it takes two- to three-days to sail here. When we left Seattle our original plan was to spend…