Day minus 9

Still in a hotel
Today was the day I was to check out of the Villa del Palmar (VdP), Flamingos in Nuevo Vallarta and move back into town to the VdP, Vallarta so I got up early and went to the gym to use the great facilities one more time. The gym was well equipped with new exercise machines plus it was well lit, air conditioned and had US television news.
The move to the other hotel took most of the morning and I got to Star in time to listen to Bob Becker explain the ins and outs of a computer navigation program he gave to Mark. This has a map a bit like Google Earth. You put in the starting coordinates and the end coordinates and it plots a great circle route and than reduces it to waypoints on a Mercator projection marine chart. I had done this manually at Mark’s request but my result is no where near as cool as seeing the result on a satellite image that can be rotated and zoomed. I suspect we will use this all the way across.
We got a call on the radio from Robin and Michelle from Warrior a 50 foot boat that Mark had met several times along his travel Southward. They were arriving in PV and wanted to say hello. Both are from Australia but spent the last few years living in Santa Cruz while working and teaching at Stanford. Robin’s speciality is nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and Michelle did her post-doc in applied linguistics studying how people learn languages. They are interesting people but they will not be on the jump. they are sailing South and will likely go through the canal.