After a week of treating ourselves to a slip, we left Marina Paraiso on Tuesday, and moved to the nearby anchorage. Aside from Key West, which was a huge splurge, our budget doesn’t allow for long stays at a slip. Once we’d cleared customs and did some chores, it was time to go. We’ll miss our neighbors..

Ok, maybe not all of our neighbors..

We did a quick spin down through the lagoon, just south of the marina. There are several more cold fronts due to come through in the next week (yay, more wind!), and Scott wanted to check out the lagoon for a possible anchorage with better protection. We spied this crazy island, which made up of floating plastic bottles…quite a spread!

This little “cable car?” moves along a rope, to transport people back and forth.

Overall, the lagoon felt quite removed, and the marinas were filled with big sport fish boats.

It wasn’t our first choice for a place to spend a week or more, so we headed back out toward the harbor, to scope out a spot there.

We passed back by our slip at Marina Paraiso on the way..

It took a bit of time to find a spot to drop anchor. Several of the boats have two anchors out, which makes them swing differently. Being single anchor people, we searched the anchorage to find others doing the same. There are a few shallow spots, and an area where we watched a boat snag their anchor line on something on the bottom. They were tangled for hours before getting free, so those areas were also out. We finally decided on a spot at the edge of the anchorage, along side the I-95 path for tour and fishing boats. Not our favorite location, but we decided getting waked from them was better than swinging into someone or floating into shallow water.

All in all, it’s really nice out here. The wakes don’t jostle us very much, and we have nice views of the shoreline and town on one side, and the skyline of Cancun beyond the harbor on the other.

We’ll spend a week or so here, while we ride out the cold fronts and explore the southern end of the island. We have some good looking neighbors…a tall ship from Germany came in yesterday.

The Aluminum Princess has finally been lowered into Mexican waters! She has a new look, in her ongoing metamorphosis. Scott decided to take the black  foam collar off. It was causing a rougher ride in a head sea, and he was losing overall speed. So she now has gone back to a regular rub rail, made of vinyl, to soften impact with us and other boats when docking. She still looks sharp!

So we’re afloat again. Here are some photos.

“Shells Sink, Dreams Float. Life’s Good On Our Boat!”