30 MAY 2015
It has been a very, very busy two
months in Belize. We have done things with anchors we didn't know
could be done, made many new friends, met up with old friends, seen
some amazing reef systems, de-spined and ate lionfish of our own
spearing, had a very nice dry Riesling for an elegant lunch in
the treetops, I don't really know where to start or how to tell it
all. So I will start at the beginning.
When I left you, we had
just cleared into Belize at San Pedro on Ambergris Cay (Am behr
griss Kee). San Pedro is the second largest community in Belize
with a total population of about 25,000 Belizeans. The capital
Belmopan is only 13,000 people. The whole country is 350,000, fewer
people than in the city of Nassau, Bahamas. We stayed for a few
nights, but the obnoxious tour-boat wakes and the exposure to wind and
swell make it a place we will never go back to except to clear
in/out. We headed south as soon as we could, but not before
encountering two wonderful local restaurants and the cruising
catamaran s/v Yachtsman's Dream. We hit it off with John and
Lela of Yachtsman's Dream and snorkeled the barrier reef cut
with them. Amazing stag-horn coral but also an awesome surge and a
lot of silt and sargassum weed. The sargassum invasion this year all
along the Yucatan coast has been off the charts and it's nasty stuff
as it piles up on the shores and beaches to form mats 50 ft out. It
decomposes into sulfurous stink and makes beach walks or anything
near the beach very unpleasant. This just motivated us to get out of
Ambergris and to an anchorage on the lee side of a weed-blocking
island. So we headed to Cay Caulker. And so did Yachtsman's
Dream.
The run was over 8-12 ft of clear
turquoise water that reminded us of the Exumas. A few shallow spots
but nothing problematic. Those spots were marked with tree branches
stuck in the sand, our first experience with this form of green and
economic markers. PVC pipe stuck in the ground is also popular.
These are of course not painted red or green and planted in seemingly
random locations so you have to really think about how to interpret
the sticks out in the middle of otherwise open water.
Cay Caulker is an uber funky place,
with lots of backpacker hostels, a few nice beaches, an awesome reef
preserve system, and an anchorage on the west side protected from all
directions except westerlies. The streets are dirt, the internet
cafes popular, and a total relief from the noise and craziness of San
Pedro. As a very popular stop along the “Gringo Highway” there are lots of hostels and hostel-goers.
Underway to Cay Caulker
Sunset over the laguna from the Iguana Reef Inn
On our way to snorkel
the barrier reef preserve at Cay Caulker
Cow Fish on the reef
From Cay Caulker we pushed on through
the infamous Porto Stuck inside pass to St. George's Cay. Porto
Stuck is only about 6 ft deep at the low spots and forces most
monohulls around the outside of the barrier reef. Hence the name since they get stuck. But we made it
through fine and found St. George's Cay to be a fascinating classic
old British-feeling island of vacation homes for the upper-crust
Belizeans. The island is the original British colonial capital of Belize,
where the British colonists finally fought off the Spanish for good
and all. One of the cannons has been recovered and mounted to
commemorate that 1794 battle. The St. George's Cay Lodge dates from
the 1950's and is built from all Belizean hardwoods. The effect is
very old British Caribbean, you sort of expect to see an off-duty
Bond, James Bond, to drift in to join the cottage guests for
family-style drinks and dinner. Fishing off the cottages' landing
deck is quiet and relaxing. There is a small private aquarium on the
island, and some very long beach walks (not quite so much weed as
Ambergris when we were there). So if you want a civilized and very
quiet getaway, consider St. George's Cay Lodge.
Fishing at sunset from
the deck at St. George's Cay Lodge
View from a sea-facing
vacation home on St. George's Cay
We then continues south through the
narrow Ships Bogue and out into the big basin outside of Belize City.
We found four enormous cruise ships anchored there, sending their
passengers out on lighters to various activities ashore and on the
reef. Wherever they were going, we didn't encounter them during our whole cruise. We spent
the night in a weird anchorage at Robinson's Point Cay, an old
boat-building site with a couple of wrecked hulls still out in the
water, where we anchored in a breeze that put us parallel to shore at
the edge of a deep basin. Anchoring in deep water is unnerving due
to inability to see what you have dropped the hook into and the
amount of chain you have to put out to ensure the anchor holds but which then allows a lot of swinging around. So
we try to anchor in shallow water. But here, with the wind parallel
to shore, going in close put us at risk of being swung into the
mangroves if the wind were to shift. So we tried to split the
difference and ended up with our hook in the steep slope dropping
into the deeps. Also not a happy place. It turns out that many of
the anchorages south of Belize City are like this. We got a lot
better at dealing with them, but this first shot at it did not make
for a good night's sleep.
En route to Robinson's'
Cays.
Sunset over the
interior mountains of Belize
We didn't hang around the Robinsons, we
set off for a small cay that got good reviews in the cruising guide,
Rendezvous Cay. This was our next “learning moment”, requiring
us to thread our way through “no man's land” waters between the
coastal channel and the barrier Reef. The waters all up and down
the southern half of Belize are spotted with reef patches and sand
bars that are typically badly charted. These hazards move
around, so the chart-makers don't bother to get super accurate with
them, and just provide the warning to proceed only with good light.
This means "only during the hours of 10:00 to about 14:00 and
preferably with the sun behind you". It also means you have to know
what reef and bar water color looks like at various depths. Which we mostly had
learned in the Bahamas, but there it's nearly all just nice soft
easy sand. Here it's a lot crunchier when you touch bottom.
We made it through using the
fair-to-middling' guidance in the cruising guide and hawk-eyed watchers on the bow and bimini top. Once through, we found an
amazingly beautiful mini-atoll surrounded by very deep water running
right up to impressive coral reefs. We anchored in 50 ft of
cobalt-blue deep water, let out 150 ft of chain to get some kind of
grip, and let the wind back us down to within less than 25 ft of the
coral and only a boat length away from a second boat off our
starboard side. First time for that trick, deep anchoring in very
close proximity to a coral lee shore and other boats, too. Everyone immediately
dove off to snorkel the reef. Except me, I stayed aboard to keep an
eye on the precarious anchor situation. Plan was to snorkel the
reefs and then scoot off back towards the mainland to a range of cays
nearby that would allow us to hang out through the coming cold front.
Turns out that there was a set of very nice palapas and a small
resort-like structure with a dock on the cay. Jennifer learned that
the island is in fact privately owned and set aside for the cruise
ship visitors, who, fortunately for us, were not coming that day. So
they let us stay for our hour or so and then we got everyone back
aboard and headed in to the Bluefield Range as planned, with the
pre-frontal clouds visible to the north and the wind picking up.
Snorkeling the reef
from the beach at Rendezvous Cay
We picked our way back across the “no
man's land” water to the Bluefield range with the now-obvious cold front
approaching. The weather models weren't very helpful in telling us
where the wind was going to go once the front arrived, so we picked a
reasonable spot inside the basin formed by the set of cays and
started to settled in. Mid-beer we heard a gentle knock and quiet
voice from our stern and found an older guy barefoot and in old
shorts in a paddled cayoga. Wayne was asking, very diplomatically,
if we planned to stay and did we know the wind was going to go
strongly west? If so, then he suggested we move up behind his cay
where he was building a fish camp. And perhaps we had some extra
coking oil and coffee since he was completely out. We did, but were
also a tetch wary of his intentions. We thanked him for his sage
advice and promptly up-anchored to move to where he had instructed
us. And a good thing we did. When the front hit that night, it did
indeed blow really hard from the west but we were snug as bugs thanks to
Wayne's advice. He came back out after we re-hooked, and we had a
grand old time, shared some beers, a little rum, and some of our
pizza we had just made.
Wayne Stevens is a fascinating old
fisherman who had grown up in a fishing family. Not a lot of teeth
left, but wise to the sea, and how to build fish camps, and jig for
lobsters. He took us trolling for barracuda, we each got one and
had a nice supper. His so-called assistant in building the fish camp
was a 20-ish guy who was obviously unhinged, leaving us wondering how
Wayne was able to sleep at night with the unstable island-mate
yelling at non-existent people and generally acting out in a violent
way. So Wayne tended to hang out a lot with us. Outside of
lobstering season, his other profession is building and repairing
lobster traps. He offered to make us a miniature one, a sort of
model, if we ever came back to the Bluefield Range. He and his
whacko assistant were the only inhabitants of the range. 15
miles from Belize City and a century from modern life. In the end,
we didn't go back, so I have to wonder what has become of Wayne.
Panorama of the Bluefield Range from
our second anchoring location.
Local fishing smack,
about 25 ft with 6-8 guys aboard, taking shelter from the front with
us.
Kayaking around the
range
Between squalls
On our way back to
Cerca Trova after
barracuda fishing
Finally, after three days, the weather
settled to where we could head on down to Placencia with an overnight
stop at Coco Plum, aka Thatch, Cay. IT was all one cay until a
hurricane in the '90's split it into three clumps. The northern one
is Thatch, then Cocoplum then a little one improbably called Paradise
Island. Each one has a little “eco resort” by the same names as
the cays. There are lots of “eco” resorts around Belize. They
are mostly “eco” because they don't have mainland-supplied
electricity or water, so there is little of each of these. But they
are very pretty places. Cocoplum had a lot of honeymooners staying
there. And an attractive bar that we kayaked over to see, but we
only stayed for one drink and headed back to the boat.
Thatch Cay (Cocoplum to
the right) on approach to the anchorage
Kayaking in the lee of
Thatch/Cocoplum, CT in the background
Kayak and hermit crab
visiting on Cocoplum Cay
Abandoned dock at
Thatch Cay, the whole resort is unoccupied and undergoing renovation
Sunset over the
mountains of Belize as seen from Thatch Cay
After our overnight at Cocoplum/Thatch,
we did the final leg on our way to the “big” town of Placencia.
Arriving at the
anchorage in Placencia, lo-and-behold, there's Yachtsman's Dream!
Squally afternoon scene
from the deck at the charming cruiser hang-out called Tranquilo
Yup, there's the squalls
We really weren't sure what we would
find in Placencia. Each time we go into a place for the first time,
what we find is never quite like what people have described it to be.
We were told that Placencia was really tiny, don't expect much, the
harbor's OK but not very protected, town is kinda ratty, provisioning is better than
elsewhere but still pretty sparse, etc. What we found was a small
and prosperous town, with busy but relaxed locals, the town was much
cleaner and in better repair than most towns in Belize, a paved main
street!, three grocery stores and lots of produce stands, two
charming waterfront bar-restaurants, one of very few large beaches in
Belize (stinky sargassum weed was dissipating but still pretty bad),
and the famous mile-long side-walk with charming cottage inns and the
Anglican church. We arrived the week before Easter and the harbor
was busy and getting busier. It seems Easter is the big party
weekend, and sure enough, on Good Friday, at 0700 a large tour boat
started ear-splitting thumping party music and by 0730 was loaded to
the gunnels with guests and headed off to the reefs, phew! Peace
reigned again. We later learned that was the entire Placencia police
force and families, and the party had been organized by the new
police chief, much to the delight of the townsfolk. They really
liked their local policemen, had to bring in a few officers from
nearby towns to cover the town while the local force was out on R&R,
and weren't overly happy about the unknown patrolmen, but put up with
it so their own guys could have some fun. And then the weekend
partying really began. By Saturday night the harbor was jammed with
boats, the beach was rocking until 3am with revelers, but there was
no sense of out-of-control, dog-the-hatches, yelling drunk craziness.
Just a big happy party.
It was that kind of place. A mix of
civilized locals, backpacking gringo-trail tourists, quite a few
ex-pat residents, and cruisers. Oh the ladies in their hats at the
Anglican church for Easter Sunday! We got the time wrong for the
service, sadly, but caught the congregation on their way out to
stroll the mile-long sidewalk.
We stayed through Easter, found the
provisioning hot-spots, made friends with the guy running the
dock-and-bar cruiser hangout called Tranquilo (and it is), and met up
with our sister boat s/v Sunny Ray with the cruising family Dan,
Marty, Ray, and Dale aboard. We invited them over for Easter egg
decorating, used the very fine Ukrainian egg dye kit which my mother
had sent us as a fun take-along, and had a great (but slow) time doing
some fancy eggs while the adults hung out and did the cruiser social
thing.
Making (Ukrainian)
Easter eggs with the Ray and Dale from s/v
Sunny Ray
Easter Day non-regatta,
s/v Sunny Ray has just
turned the first mark under one reef
The Monday after Easter we had booked
what we hoped would be the highlight of Marty and Sue's cruise with
us, a pro-led boat trip outside the reef to find whale sharks. The
whale sharks turn up along the outside of the reef to feed on the
fish-spawn which blooms on the nights of full moons in the spring.
And Easter is the said to be the best full moon for seeing them. The
park system in Belize is confusingly regulated, but where the whale
sharks most often hang out was clearly very tightly controlled to
exclude amateur sight-seers and protect the difficult-to-navigate
reef passes. They control the number of tour boats allowed on the
site and even given them time windows to be on-site. Since we knew
we had no idea how to actually find the sharks, much less manage all
the regulatory stuff, we signed up. When we asked about the
likelihood of seeing a whale shark and got a sort of sage nod and
demurred “we'll do our best.”
So morning came, we trucked all our
gear to the snorkelers' boat (diving would have been twice the cost
and four times the effort with about the same reward), and set off on
top of the huge diesels. It was nearly two hours at top speed to the
outer reef, check-in with a ranger boat anchored out at the site, and
then out through the pass into the open ocean. The dive master
explained the game – once the skipper spots fish on his
fish-finder, everyone does a Navy-seal get-in-the-water mad dash, the
divers take the low station about 50ft, the snorkelers take the
surface station, and everyone swims as hard as they can in a search
pattern to try to spot a whale shark. For an hour. Then they fish
us out for a rest and we do it again.
First pass in the water turned up nothing.
We swam like mad things until it was apparent that there were no
whale sharks. So we used up our time blowing air-bubble rings and
taking silly selfies using the air bubbles as mirrors. The rest
break was also lunch, and was back inside the pass on a gorgeous reef
where we let the divers blow off their retained nitrogen and we got a
rare chance to snorkel a protected reef. And then my underwater
camera broke :O ^%&$@! ! Oh well, back out the pass and over the side we
went for pass #2. And this time we spotted a large pod of dolphins,
the old male circled me several times and made eye-contact enough for
me to wonder what he was thinking about. It was super cool. And
then the cry went up “SHARK!!” and the horde took off through the
water. We, the snorkelers, had spotted a whale shark, and so had the
dolphins. It was the largest animal I have ever been in the wild
with, it dwarfed the dolphins who dove down to check it out too. One
of the group had a working Go-Pro and did get some seriously awesome
footage which he promised to share, but sadly never did. So we saw
one, we really did, but no photos, but we did. And we will remember it for the rest of our lives.
Whale shark trip, Marty
scanning the horizon
Jennifer looking for a
whale shark
Reflected selfies in
the air bubbles
All phases of life must come to an end
and so, with lots of hugs and excited chatter about our adventures,
many thanks for their cheery company, their vital help in the
offshore passages and key skills in some tricky repairs, we put Marty
and Sue on their chosen mode of transport to the airport at Belize
City, the local bus.
With Marty and Sue off the boat, on our own for the first time in nearly two months, we didn't know if we should be lonely or go cut up the town. We did a little of each.
We trolled through town, we hit a nice rest for a nice lunch with a great dry Riesling and parrots in a hutch in their courtyard, we hung at the cruisers' hangs, we sat tight through some sopping weather and watched the bareboat charterers dutifully driving out into he rain to do their week's charter in Belize. But we had lots more places to go and people to see. So we arranged with Yachtsman's Dream to buddy cruise to some cays they wanted to scope out and then proceed up the Sittee River to see our friends Tim ad Karen who have retired there with their own cruising boat on a dock on the river. One last sunset evening in the Placencia Harbor and off we went again.
Marty and Sue have to
go home, after six weeks of cruising with us, so they chose the slow
bus
Sign-post in the middle
of town to remind you of where you aren't
Back courtyard of
Rumyfish with year-round parrot dorm
Rumyfish, the nicest
restaurant on the coast, has the right attitude
and a decent wine
list that they struggle to keep stocked in this 3rd-world country.
A gray afternoon at the
beach watching the charter boats stream out
Sunset over Placencia
Harbor
Buddy cruising with s/v Yachtsman's
Dream was really fun. We had met them on our first night in Belize
and ran into them many times during our stay. Yachtsman's Dream is a
43ft catamaran, we are a 42ft catamaran, so we sail similarly and can
go to similar places. They have a lot more experience and were happy
to teach us as we went, and happy to let us take point when we wanted
to. They had already been in to the very tricky anchorage at the
Pelican Cays and knew how to help us when we had failed four times in
a row to get our anchor to bite. And Lela has two underwater cameras
(ours had dies on the whale shark trip) so supplied us with lots of
images fro our snorkeling adventures.
Belizean beach scene in
the outer cays
Cerca
Trova and Yachtsman's
Dream at anchor off North Long Coco Cay
Snorkeling at North
Long Coco Cay
Remote cay scene near
the barrier reef
Rare blue tunicates.
They are about the size of pencil erasers.
Reef life off of North
Long Coco Cay
Sunset over the
Belizean mountains as seen from North Long Coco Cay
After a week of checking out cays, we
peeled off and crossed the bar to go up the Sittee River. The bar is
very shallow, at about 5ft of depth, and we draw 4ft. We went in a
near high tide so we had an extra 6 inches of water under the keels.
But still, it's pretty spooky driving in to water that's is murky and
getting shallower and shallower in a twisty route marked only with
pieces of PVC piles stuck in the sea bad. So we called for help from
the marina, who very kindly sent out two guys in a launch to show us
the route in. With their help, we had no problems at all and got our
first experience driving our large ocean-going boat up a narrow
river.
We found at least 10ft of water in the
river and very little current. The trees were all in bloom and
dropping blossoms on the water. We had been told there were
alligators but we didn't see any. Nor did we see Dr. Livingston.
But we kept our eyes peeled for both. We took baths! And had air
conditioning! It turns out that April is the hottest month of the
year in Belize because the weather stays dry and the sun is mounting
higher towards the start of summer. So we really appreciated the
A/C. But after a week of civilized living we got antsy to get
back to sea.
Up the Sittee River
after crossing the bar, mayflower trees in full bloom
On a mooring in the
Sittee River Marina
The back canal route
from Tim and Karen's house to the marina –
Dr. Livingston was
nowhere to be found
Our friends have a house with its' back
to the canal and its'front to the beach. We spent a wonderful week
with them in their guest apartment. We rented a car, drove up into
the jaguar preserve and hiked to the waterfalls there. We drove all
the way back down to Placencia. We drove up to see the capital city
of Belmopan via the Hummingbird Highway, where we didn't see any
hummingbirds but we did see a coatomundi, lots of school kids,
amazing mountain vistas, and seven one-lane bridges that carry all
the south-bound traffic of the country.
Dinghy tour of the
Sittee
So we loaded up
Cerca Trova and
headed once more back to Placencia. We were looking forward to
meeting up again with s/v
Yachtsman's Dream
and compared plans for cruising onward. They were setting up to head
for Panama for hurricane season whereas we planed to head to
Guatemala. But they were stuck for at least three weeks waiting for
parts for their water maker and we really wanted to get moving. In
the end, we left them there, using the Hockey Pokey Water Taxi to
take us inland to the town of Mango/Big Creek where the local
immigration and customs offices are, and cleared out for Guatemala.
One more stop at Placencia
In all the rest of the world except the
US you have to clear out as well as clear in with the officials.
They issue a document called a zarpe that shows you left the country
in good standing and the country declared as your next destination.
That keeps boats from just wandering around willy nilly and a keeps a
lid on illicit smuggling of drugs in particular. So we paid our
fees, filled in the crew list forms, and got our zarpe. We were
cleared out of Belize with the destination of Guatemala.
The Hockey Pockey Water
Taxi to get our clearing out papers, aka zarpe
From Placencia we ran south to the
Sapodillo Range. But Yachtsman's Dream came with us! They decided
that their chances to buddy-cruise were few and far between, so they
filled their water tanks and ran down with us. We found a difficult
cay, Lime Cay, which was our best choice to avid the larger Hunting
Cay and its Belizean Coast Guard base, behind the main barrier reef
but exposed to the wind with very marginal anchoring in a few inches
of sand on top of hard smooth coral rock (imagine trying to get an
anchor to set in half inch of mashed potatoes spread on a cookie
sheet). We did find really nice snorkeling, much less visited than
the more northerly cays. And we found lionfish. Lionfish are an
invasive pest species, very showy but with poisonous spines, which
you are allowed to spear with no limits and no season. Jennifer and
Lela went on a lionfish spearing spree and then had a great time
figuring out how to clean them. The end result were some yummy lionfish-in-bacon appetizers for our last dinner together that night.
The next morning we were up early and so were they. They turned north to wait for their watermaker part. We ran out the
cut through the barrier reef into the open water of the Gulf of
Honduras and west to a staging anchorage that would allow us to cross
the river bar on the next morning's high tide into the Rio Dulce of Guatemala at Livingston
Approaching the mouth of the Rio Dulce at Livingston, Guatemala
