s/v Gratitouille: HAPPY BIRTHDAY J!!!

Happy Birthday, J, wish we could be there to celebrate with you (and have cinnamon ice cream!)! Or, if you were here, we could go out for helado and get the frutas seca flavor (supposed to be dried fruit but tastes like cinnamon).

And, you could be livin' the good life - without the jacket and beanie!

In the bay just before Santiago, we met Fernando who is doing an experiment with shrimp in the cove there. We got to talk to him (in Spanish!) for a few hours about the project and his previous life on ships up and down the coast. We learned from him that they separate the boy and girl shrimp in the lab before they bring them out to the ocean because they grow faster if they are separated. The pen in the bay where we were (just over Darren's left shoulder) was all girl shrimp! Fernando didn't tell us how they separate the shrimp but Darren figures they put them all in the gym, play some dance music and the girls line up on one wall and the boys line up on the other!

You would love the dolphins, we saw three different kinds on our trip from Santiago to Zihuatanejo alone! At N18* 04.557 W103* 34.403 (where were we?) we saw a pod of common bottlenosed dolphins and just under an hour later we saw our first sailfish jumping! Unfortunately the pix of those didn't turn out.

We also saw a mom, dad and baby humpback on that passage! They came pretty close to the boat. They didn't breach like some of the whales do, just poked their backs above water every so often. Where were we when we took this pic at N18* 57.932 W104* 18.463?

Since we passed Cabo Corrientes we have been seeing lots of birds that we call hitchhikers. They stand on the backs of the sea turtles!

You would also love all the boats, people take basic pangas and customize them in many different ways. And here is one of the pickups that has been customized to be a full taco kitchen! (The tacos were yummy!)