Change is upon us

Royalston, MA

Change is upon us here.  The mist is rising from the trout stream this morning under the red, orange, and pine-green trees, the swamp maples have dropped their leaves.  We have had our first frost and more are coming.  We will be away to Cerca Trova in two weeks.

But change is also brewing in the outside world.  We have personally seen the change, the dying reefs, the species shifts, the increased storms, the changing rain patterns, and we are here to tell you it is absolutely happening.  But a cousin sent around an article by a vehement Denier about how, finally, a heroic climate scientist was calling bullshit on the world-wide clamor to act.  So I dug into that article and the climate scientist in question and here’s what I found.  It runs a bit long because it takes some work to unpack the truth.

The article is here https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2014/03/finally-real-climate-science/.  It definitely challenges the standing belief that climate change is both real and man-made, so it definitely deserves some real attention.  It makes the challenge with name-calling and shaming, and only one minor scientific argument that is at least worth noting.

The way to credibly assess a scientific position is to examine the people taking the position, the position itself, and the manner in which the position is presented.  Using this approach, several things stand out with Tony Thomas’ article on Quadrant.au about Mototaka Nakamura.

The most obvious one is that Quadrant has an obvious audience and the article sells well with that audience.  Other material on Quadrant is almost entirely name-calling that plays to the people who need to be outraged.  Tony Thomas is himself not a scientist and has never done any modelling work.  He is a “prolific contributor” to Quadrant.  He and Quadrant are clearly making a profit from promoting the controversy.  I.e. he clearly has a conflict of interest.

The other key person is Nakamura.  See https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2013331662_Mototaka_Nakamura   ResearchGate is essentially the IMDB of peer-reviewed science, ie the only credible science because without peer-review you can say anything that will get printed.

Nakamura’s body of work stops in 2010.  His last topic of work largely dealt with baroclinic waves (like the meanders in the jet stream) as factors in various elements of dynamic climate such as the polar vortex phenomenon.  He has published nothing that has a global integrated climate output.  His work has largely dealt with small-scale models of particularly complex non-linear elements.  He has never published work that shows the global observed changes can be ascribed to any mechanism other than green house gas emissions.  I.e. he is not a published global climate scientist.

Thomas paraphrases Nakamura, since what Nakamura has actually written is not readily available.  Nakamura’s book does exist but there is no way to actually read it since it is indeed in Japanese https://www.amazon.com/kikoukagakushanokokuhaku-chikyuuonndannkahamikennshounokasetsu-Japanese-Nakamura-Mototaka-ebook/dp/B07FKHF7T2/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=mototaka+nakamura&qid=1570052979&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 .  The excerpts in English that Thomas offers are not translation-cited.  But in those excerpts I see a lot of language of Nakamura “throwing sour grapes”.  Nakamura's specific complaint that Thomas reports is that climate modelling is so complicated that drawing conclusions is useless.  From the get-go this is a bit strange since Nakamra's entire body of science work is in fact built on computer modelling. 

Just how accurate is Thomas’ interpretation of a book in Japanese, since I am willing to be that Thomas doesn’t read Japanese? Note that I am operating only on Thomas’ presentation.   And he has already been shown to have a conflict of interest.  But it is all we have to go on for now.

There is a fundamental truth in science, a sine dicens since it is so utterly obvious, which a Canadian economist George Box put into eloquent words about two decades ago: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.  In this specific case, the question is - can these models be used to predict our near future?

Every single scientist who is an actual scientist knows that his/her model (a.k.a theory-expressed-as-equations) is incomplete.  The way computer models are built is to assemble the equations which describe the phenomenon, fit the equations’ parameters (the A, B, C etc, typically multiplier factors) to a set of known data (called the ‘learning set’), and then test that fit with a new set of data (called ‘the test set’).  This is indeed how nearly all climate modelling has been done.

You might ask how is both a ‘learning set’ and a ‘test set’ obtained.  Good question.  In the climate situation where the only climate data are historical, i.e. you can’t just run the experiment again and collect a new set of data, one way is to draw the learning data from one subset of the measurements, say every other reading, and the test set is the remaining data.  Another way is to fit the model to one output parameter, say global temperature, and test against a different parameter, say sea level.  This latter approach is much more powerful and is the basis for most of the predictions being made.  

Predictions are the central point of contention in Thomas’ write-up, since Thomas says Nakamura says predictions can’t be done by modelling even though he has done so himself.   In an absolute sense, this is correct.  Another sine discens is that “extrapolations are hazardous.”  Predictions can be legitimately made out as far as the model error diverges to where it’s judged the predictions are not confident, typically the 95% confidence level. However, the way climate predictions are being done, using about 100,000 years of historical data, is to only look at model outputs for the next 50-100 years, which is only a few sample points ahead of Now and are well within the 95% confidence interval of the models.  This is perfectly legitimate and is almost always done with models.  For models being built with recorded data from the post-industrial age, the predictions are still being only pushed out to where the model error is excessive.

In fact the echo cancellation technology in your long distance phone connections does this every single time you make a phone call, predicting the sounds that will bounce back on the line and subtracting them before putting the result on to your ears.  Do you remember hearing echos on your long distance calls?  Not for a long while now.  I.e. the models are now good enough to predict the signal to several seconds, which is in fact several thousand sample intervals ahead of Now.

As for the manner in which Thomas presents the results, note the language and tone of it all as disparaging and only one single scientific argument. That argument is interesting.  Thomas says that Nakamura says that existing climate models can only be made to fit by adjusting some model parameters to outrageous values. I have no way to assess the validity of this statement itself since I am not active in the model-making work and have not dug in to the models themselves.  But if this is the case, then it is a legitimate complaint.  

In my own modelling work for my doctorate, I arrived at bizarre parameter values, for example negative volumes for the heart, in order to get the models to fit the data.  My doctoral committee pointed this out and I was able to show many more instances where the model fit without resorting to weird parameter values.  And in the end, my model was able to successfully predict and remove the signal in question, much like the echo cancellation example above, so we all said “there must be more to this beastie” and drove on.

Which is the case with climate science.  Everyone knows there’s more to the beastie.  Saying that the beastie is too complicated so we are just going to ignore it is specious at best and fatal at worst.  The entire September issue of the Economist is saying that the non-linear tipping points are beyond current science, for now, but the results are unanimously foreboding.  But science progresses when the next kid up takes what’s been done and adds in another factor to get to an even better model.  Which is what has been going on with climate science since the first warning report was presented to President Johnson in 1965 (which he ignored BTW).

Ultimately, there’s my own observations in the real world.  I have traversed the Caribbean for 40 years of which the last 10 years have seen 15,000 miles under sail.  Climate has absolutely changed since 1980’s.  No question, I am here to testify to it.  Will it continue to change?  All the models say yes, it is changing 100 fold faster than has ever been seen in geobiologic history, and that the factors which we can measure also can account for that change in ways that predict no slowing of the change within our kids’ lifetimes (which is a blink of an eye in geobiologic history)

But bottom line, are the predictions accurately, absolutely correct?  No.  All models are wrong but some are useful.  The translations of Nakamura reads like a spoiled perfectionist, not a thoughtful scientist working to address the situation.  There is way too much hysteria and not enough discussion.  Nakamura does not help the situation.  

But are the predictions useful?  Absolutely.  They are clearly fitting what is being observed well enough that each decade the situation becomes more clearly problematic.  Does it matter if we see another 1oC increase in 30 years or in 50?  Not in the sense that it’s all bad news and we need to be doing something about it.  And are we thinking about the consequences of that news to us and our cruising?  Absolutely. However, notice that we personally are not selling the boat and buying a survivalist’s cabin on high ground.

The real question is whether we, the world village, are willing to take the risk that the predictions are fundamentally wrong.  The canaries in the coal mine are screaming, the managers are saying there’s a problem, and we can’t get out of the coal mine.

There's no place like home

Coming up along the coast of Florida on our "ruby slipper" I couldn't help but recall this lesser known delight from "A Child's Garden of Verses":

• The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
        Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
  And high overhead and all moving about,
        There were thousands of millions of stars.
  There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
        Nor of people in church or the Park,
  As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
        And that glittered and winked in the dark.
  
  The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
        And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
  These shown in the sky, and the pail by the wall
        Would be half full of water and stars.
  They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
        And they soon had me packed into bed;
  But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
        And the stars going round in my head.

And now we are home.  We clicked our heels and jumped on the great currents that roar up from the western Carribean, and 1000 miles flew past.

We spent the spring cruising Belize.  We tried twice to get to Roatan but the weather was blowing very hard from the southeast most of the season and we never got there.  So instead we dove on Lighthouse Reef, met and hung with new old friends, and really got inside the details of cruising Belize. 

A Tough Springtime in Belize

After clearing out of Guatemala with our new Copper Coat, we intended to run up the Belize barrier reef then cross to Roatan.   After nearly two weeks, not cleared in and waiting on weather, we gave up and returned to Placencia to clear in.  The SE trade winds were just not backing off and we had pushed things about as far as we thought we could with the Belezian officialdom.  Three days after clearing in to Belize there was a decent window to Roatan, arrggh.


Final state of our fancy new CopperCoat bottom paint



Arnie Juarez and his team cheering on our re-launch



The new Cerca Trova visits Monkey Bay Marina on Valentines Day



Belize Black Orchid at Monkey Bay

Orchid at Monkey Bay

The waterfront at Livingston Guatemala

But we took the positive view and worked our way out to Lighthouse Reef, where we again met up with sv BlueJacket  with our friends Geoff and Sue from Hudson MA.  We got in a couple of dives before the weather started kicking up again (tough diving from a 10ft dingy in 3ft waves) and we all trooped over to Cay Caulker to re-provision and wait for better diving weather to appear.  We waited a week and got to know Cay Caulker pretty well.  If/when you go, be sure to eat at Pasta Per Caso!



sv Blue Jacket under sail for Lighthouse Reef



A very fine breakfast including jam from Vermont

On our way back out to Lighthouse, anchored along the west side of Turneffe Atoll, we met up with long-time Belize cruisers mv Chickcharnie and mv My Island Queen.  My Island Queen showed us how to cut through the middle of Turneffe and save 20 miles on the run from Cay Caulker to Lighthouse.  With this short cut, the trip from Cay Caulker to Lighthouse drops to roughly 65 miles which is doable in one long day of travel.  This would allow us to stay out at Lighthouse and only return to Caye Caulker just ahead of bad weather. 

We learned a lot more from these seasoned boats beyond the short-cut.  They taught us tips on fishing which led to us landing our first Mahi Mahi on our next jump to Lighthouse. We learned about the state of fishing within Belize, it's not good and the locals are now turning to deep-line fishing, which takes the breeding stock, in order to keep their catches up.  We learned how to actually land a mahi mahi (very soft mouths so have to be gentle despite how hard they fight).  We learned that doctor fly season runs about the time we were there - doctor flies are vicious deer flies that make deep punctures which you can't feel until a day later when the bites swell into welts.  We learned about some great, tucked away anchorages for the trip to and from the Rio Dulce.  And we learned their truism "it's called pleasure-boating - if its' not pleasurable you shouldn't be doing it."




Our very first ever successfully landed Mahi Mahi, caught on our way to Lighthouse



Anchorage at Caye Caulker



Sunset from the "back" side of Caye Caulker

A troop of travelling circus performers one night at Restaurant Suggestion Gourmet

We got back out to Lighthouse, squeezed in another set of dives, and then after only a week on-site, we had to leave to put the boat on a dock for Easter week so we could meet friends on a previously-booked trip to the British Virgin Islands on the only time-share we have ever been sucked into, on crewed sailing catamarans.  It was a real treat to have a pro crew look after us, feed us, deal with the boat logistics, get us to all the great places.  But we had to leave CT tied up safe during the busiest week in Belize.  We found a spot at the nicer marina in Placencia and got there just ahead of the rush of power boats coming from Guatemala for "Semana Santa".  Had a nice dinner and caught our plane two days later for the BVI's via Miami and Puerto Rico.  We had a great time, it was soooo nice to be having that much fun and all the headaches were someone else's.  And we spent enough time in San Juan to really see the charms there.  We will definitely go back.



Sprightly sail inside the reef at Lighthouse



A Lighthouse sunset



Cerca Trova running down to Placencia passing a school ship motor-sailing the other way
(photo courtesy sv Blue Jacket)



Hanging at the Placencia marina while we set up to fly to the BVIs

Road Town Harbor, BVI



Francis Drake Channel from The Baths

Scrambling around The Baths

 

The world-famous Bubbly Pool

Our charter buddies, and Skipper Guy in the foreground



Castillo of Old San Juan

Astounding antique Swiss chandelier at the bar of the Conrad San Juan



Equally astounding street of umbrellas in Old San Juan

On our return, we got new Belize visas but our boat's permit had expired, so we dashed over to the officials' offices the next morning and cleared out with the intention of trying for Roatan, or heading for the States.  Weather was again pumping hard out of the southeast so we decided to start on our voyage back to the States.  We had considered many options going forward, from pushing all the way east to the eastern Caribbean, more time in the Bahamas and then to Puerto Rico or Cuba, but we had had enough of Belize.  It had been a rough season with too much wind and not much diving (with a lot of effort we got in a total of 7 dives in two months), and we had been outside the US for a year and half.  Time to go home. 

With that decision made, we hoofed it from Placencia to Cay Caulker, 100 miles in 2 days, much of it into the wind, and ... waited for a weather window.  sv Blue Jacket was there and so was our first-ever cruising buddies sv Take Two, there doing the same  waiting for a window north, although they were headed to Isla Mujeres.  We have been to Isla twice for a month each and know hard it is to get out of there across the Yucatan current and fight due east into the prevailing winds.  Our better idea was to jump directly from Belize, ride the Yucatan current north while bearing gently east to graze the western tip of Cuba called Cabo San Antonio, then wrap around there, catch the Gulf Stream and ride it all the way to Key West. Great plan, weather window arrived, and then the night before we were going to jump I discovered on my pre-passage checks we had water in both sail drives.  This is like having saltwater in your transmission, really bad news.

A week after getting back to Belize we had to turn back from the threshold and go back to the Rio Dulce for repairs.

"Once more on to the concrete, dear friends!"

We love the Rio.  The easy pace, the lovely people, our many friends among the ex-pats and cruisers.  But we got there pushing hard (2 and half days and 150 miles nearly all under sail to save the motors), rushed through paperwork to clear back in, a quick stop at Cayo Quemado, and up to the boat lift of RAM Marina.  We had been on the phone with them as we ran down the coast of Belize so they had our parts already on order and, in fact, the parts got there before we were even hauled out.
 


Cerca Trova (left) and unknown boat at entry to Cayo Quemado

Cerca Trova at anchor off of Cayo Quemado

 

Cooling swim in El Golfete

Sunset over the eastern end of El Golfete

The repairs took a week on the hard.  We spent a total of two weeks in the Rio, waiting for tasks and making sure the boat was operating correctly after the haul-out.  We lucked out with lodging (conditions in the boat yard were in the mid-90's and utterly windless, we *had* to have A/C and a quiet room to stay in) and our good friends Lobis and Jim of Punta Bonita had our own little casita available for us.  So we stayed there, it was sooo comfortable after our very rough cruising season.  At the boat yard, the machinist and the mechanic were top-notch.  We also squeezed in a significant carpentry repair project while waiting for various sub-projects, carpentry work that would have cost us an arm and a leg in the US, and got our brand new gel coat waxed and polished.  Then back into the water, a motor run back down the river to Cayo Quemado (the new seals were doing their job!), one last chicken-fry at Texas Mini-Mikes, and away down the river to clear out.  Somehow in there we had a chance to meet more new old friends, who have built a house at Cayo Quemado and cruise Belize in the good months, and who took us for Sunday lunch at a cool place on the banks of the Rio just up from Livingston. 


Old sleeves on drive shaft (note grooving)

New sleeve on drive shaft

Back into the water after the repairs

But it was now near the end of May and the weather was turning to the summer pattern - no wind, and lots of thunder storms), we really needed to hoof it to get out of there.  We cleared out at Livingston on our way past, Raul's service agency Servamar did a smashing quick job of that and got us out of there just before the next rainstorm hit, and we pushed up to one of those new-to-us anchorages we had learned about from the old-time Belize cruising crowd back in Turneffe.  From there we pushed into a north east wind for 50 miles, by-passing Placencia all together, to the little range of cays called the Pelicans with the one-room eco-resort Hide-Away Cay (http://www.hideawaycaye.com/), where our friends Dustin and Kim treat passing cruisers (and their one-room guest(s)) to right-off-the-reef seafood dinners.  It was our 20th anniversary and we had to just stop for a breather. So we did.

Breather over, we were again back to pushing north.  We made it 60 miles that day to another "hidden" anchorage we had learned about this year, only a few miles outside of Belize City but utterly hidden in quiet mangroves, but now it was so hot and so full of mosquitos and noseeums we had to close the boat and run the boat's A/C on the generator all night.  We made it through that Night of Bugs and Heat and high-tailed it to Cay Caulker.  To wait, again, for a weather window north.

We got one after about a week.  It was clear that conditions would be very rough for the first 24hrs out of Belize but, if we could get through that, then things would settle down and the rest of the run to Cabo San Antonio would be pretty benign.  Many thanks to our patient and professional weather forecaster, Chis Parker.  One last lovely dinner at Pasta Per Caso and off we went. 

Yah, it was rough with  6ft seas hitting us on the beam all night until we were nearly to Cozumel.  But then things did start to settle down.  So much so that by that evening we had our whole mainsail up as we crossed the Yucatan Trench towards Cuba.  We usually pull in a reef for the night, and in doing so this time we discovered that two of the cars which hold our sail to the mast had broken. Fortunately these cars were below the second reef level, so we pulled the sail down to second reef and continued overnight.  We had 2-3 knots of current carrying us forward and were making respectable speed despite the double reef and modest wind.  We arrived at dawn at Cabo San Antonio and anchored inside the point to make repairs as best we could.  We had *sailed* the whole way, 350 miles in 50 hours and only used the engines to charge batteries and for that final maneuvering to anchor.  Gotta love a good strong current when it's working for  you.

We couldn't fix the broken cars but we did fix the problem that had caused them to break, which left us stuck on the second reef until we could get back to the US and get new parts.  We took an extra night there at Cabo San Antonio to rest and then took off inside their reef, anchoring twice before jumping out a cut in the reef and making for Key West.  That whole section of north west Cuba is a national park that's 100 miles of nearly deserted mangroves and reefs.  Truely lovely untouched ecology.  Maybe the best cruising we had had all year.  Two fisherman did turn up and sold us the largest lobsters and snapper we had seen all year, for $20US.  The best thing we can do to break down the Cuban military regime is teach the citizens the benefits of free enterprise.  They seem to be catching on.  But what will that do to these last remaining wild places?



Mast track separation that caused the car failures

Squall over Cayo Buena Vista

Squall chasing us up the reef

After the squalls, before turning for Key West

Again, we set off into the current.  Timing, current and weather were with us.  We had the current (now called the Gulf Stream) pushing us directly NE towards the Keys and essentially no easterly wind.  When the easterly trades pump up against the Gulf Stream, a lethal sea state can develop, one that will wreak havock with large ships much less little cruising boats like us.  Ie. we had no wind against us, a benign sea state, and plenty of helping current, all good.  The mainsail was limited to just the second reef but we had to motor anyway due to there being no wind.  We were moving so well that we decided to motor our way past Key West all the way to Marathon and the wonderful cruisers' harbor at Boot Key.  Overall, that was 180 miles we did in 30 hours. 



One more mahi on our way to Key West

Phew!  Back in the U S A.

Oh, I forgot to mention, our fridge/freezer had decided to lose all it's coolant on the run from Belize to Cuba.  I replaced that on anchor at Cabo San Antonio, but we knew it was just a matter of time before the whole thing went belly up and we lost all our cold stores, including another mahi mahi that decided to take our lure just at sunset going into the Gulf Stream. 

Job #1 at Marathon was to replace the broken sail cars.  And #2 was get the fridge system replaced.  Both were accomplished in a week and we took CT out for a trial overnight on anchor.  Weeell, the sail car replacement was a total success but that brand new and very expensive refer system was barely working. 

Back to the Boot Key harbor and another call to the installers (whom we have known since our very first stop there years ago and been wrestling with the refer).  They came back out on short notice, examined their work and declared it was working correctly.  But it just wasn't effectively cooling the way our old until had.  What a PITA. In the end we agreed to return in the fall and let them make it right, because, as much as we enjoy the scene at Boot Key, we really really wanted to get out of there and up to our summer base in Ft. Pierce. 

OK, off we went again, with overnight stops at Key Largo and Key Biscayne, then an overnight passage to get us all the way from Miami to Ft. Pierce.  We hit the Ft. Pierce channel as the out-going tide was beginning to die down, anchored off the marina until that had a slip for us, and went in on a now-slack tide to tie up. 



Sunrise off Stuart FL as we finish our passage north

On our summer dock in Fort Pierce

For now, we are rushing around finishing must-do projects which can only be done on a dock (docks are *expensive* in the US!) and preparing CT to sit on her own for the summer months. 

We are off and away, by plane this time, in a week.

A Winter of Work

We have known for years that the decking on Cerca Trova was badly done. The deck section had come out of the mold with a lot of flaws which had been patched at the factory. We bought her knowing this, knowing there were no structural issues with the deck, it just looked bad. Over the years, too, the gel coat (the glossy outer layer of the fiberglass sandwich) has worn away with use, with polishing, and had been very thin in places to begin with. So this past winter it was time to deal with it. Which why we planned to stay in the Rio through the winter to get this done where the workers are skilled and costs a quarter of the same work in the US.

Three years ago, as we passed through the Rio, we did some research on contractors and even got a bid from one of them. We weren't quite ready to pull the trigger and so sailed back to the US, cruised the Bahamas, etc. Then, since we had ended our cruising last spring in the Rio, we in-depth interviewed the same two contractors, sought references and example work, drew up project plans, and took the plunge having finally chosen the same guy who had given us the bid three years ago. His name is Arnie, he has been doing this kind of work for 25 years, speaks lovely English (key to ensuring the job proceeded correctly), and had his own crew of full time guys. It was an enormous project in our eyes, the full team working full time for four moths. It involved first removing everything that was removable from the deck (all sails, lines, fittings, anchors-and-chains, safety gear, cushions, awnings, .. pulling the windlass off the deck is a three-hour job), and then grinding off all the gel coat of the deck, making new panels of the textured “non-skid” pattern from gel coat and fiberglass cloth, gluing those panels back on the deck, fairing their edges to the deck with new gelcoat, and then spraying smooth gel coat over all the rest of the deck area. And, while we were at it, we splurged on the latest boat paint that is basically an epoxy coating loaded with copper power and good (they say!) for ten years, rebuilding our window louvers which had been badly designed and had been disintegrating over the years, and an array of smaller projects. We booked a haul-out at the yard Arnie uses for this past October, then after summer in the States we flew back in a week ahead of the haul-out, got Cerca Trova to the yard, hauled her out, and turned her over to Arnie. But we didn't go far. It is a dictum of this kind of work, whether in the first world or the third world, that you stay on hand and monitor, supervise, and make decisions about the inevitable unplanned surprises.

We settled in a casita at the lovely Punta Bonita Lodge and Marina right on the banks of the river. We kept ahold of our dinghy to get back and forth to the yard daily and for trips into town because Punta Bonita is on an island, there was no land access to anything. We moved about ten dinghy-loads of stuff to the casita from our boat-home since we were going to be living there for four months. We went daily to the yard, checked with Arnie on their progress and problems, and tackled our set of DIY tasks such as replacing the shaft seals on the saildrives, fixing a persistent plumbing issue with the toilet in our bathroom, hunting and fixing several pernicious leaks, rebuilding the RF feed cable to our shortwave antenna, etc etc etc. We managed the shipping of all the required parts and supplies since very little is available in the Rio. We did Thanksgiving with the wonderfully warm Jim and Kitty at our “home base” marina of Monkey Bay Marina. We took breaks to go swim in Lago Izabal. We did some work for the local NGO “Pass It On Guatemala” in the form of trips to villages to install solar-powered lighting for community centers. And we spent a lot of time just keeping life going with grocery shopping and all the other things that make life busy anywhere.

Guatemala City on our way back to the Rio to Begin the Big Project

Hauled out, the crew had us packed in with other boats

Lunch break at the Burger Shack right on the river

The non-skid panels ground off

Prepping the hull for the Copper Coat primer

Evening view from Punta Bonita

Punta Bonita's mascot, and the great bridge over the Rio Dulce

Prop shaft seals replaced and new bearing cap in place

Quick break to help install solar-powered lights in a village above the Rio

 

 

Rebuilding and lubricating thru-hull valves

After the work got going steadily, we did take off on some land travel. We just haven't done enough of that as we cruise, sticking to the boat and not seeing the countries we travel through. So we took a trip to see some seriously large Mayan ruins near the Rio and we treated ourselves to a Central American cities tour in December.

Our Mayan ruins trip took us to the sites of Quigua and Copan. Quirigua is known for very large stone stellae, including the famous “Stella E” which is 35 ft high and the largest in Central America, and fanciful stone animals carved from boulders the size of minivans. What we found were those artifacts as expected and unexpectedly a beautiful green park wrapping around the ruins and surrounded by cool forest full of birds. Then it was onto Copan, Honduras. We found a lovely hostel with its patio ovelooking a creek, about a 20 min walk from the site in the cute little town of Copan Ruinas. We hired a ruins guide and had a fascinating day on the site. The flocks of Macaws living at the site we really fun to watch flying in colorful flocks overhead. We lucked out with weather and had gorgeous, but not hot, sun for the whole trip. But a lot of the site is actually underground, where the archeologists have excavated below the surface level of buildings to exposed the level of structures that the most recent had been on top of. We also had a wonderful day touring the Welchez' family coffee and fruit plantation, Finca Santa Isabel, just south of the ruins and up in the cloud forest. The coffee process is complex and pursued with deep knowledge akin to the ways of vinters. They sell their stunningly good coffee via the internet, if you would like to try it, and their web sales are run personally by a Welchez daughter.

 

At Quirigua

 

 

 

At Copan



3 dots and 3 lines =18, as in "18 Rabbit"

the famous heiroglyphic stair

disco jaguar

this way to the undercroft

stone head out in a field

 

At Finca Sta Isabel

before leaf-cutter ants

after leaf-cutter ants

    

coffee plants in the cloud forest



street art in the village of Copan Ruinas

 

Christmas season on the Rio

    

 

Our second, longer trip took us first to Panama City in the Christmas season where we stayed near but not in, the old center. We splurged on a personal guide who had been recommended by our friends on Take Two for a day of seeing the city and the Canal (which is a truly impressive feat of engineering, even now 100 years after it was built). And we took a day on our own to go walk-about. We spent a lovely afternoon in the old town at a cafe and with shopping. Panama City is sort of the Manhattan of Central America, located at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. There are fine restaurants and stores, high-rise apartment towers, businesses, constant shipping traffic, workers and visitors from all over the world, all driven by the Canal.

From Panama City, which is a surprisingly long 3 hr flight from Guatemala City, we hopped to Cartegena, Columbia. Cartegena is one of the oldest cities in the New World. And it is really old. It dates to the early 1500's and was a vitally important harbor for the Spanish as their main deep-water port for shipping treasure back to the Old World. The old city is one of only three walled cities in the New World (name the other two: ____ , and ____ ). Since it was Christmas time, the walls and towers were decorated with lights, the city parks were festooned with lights, the residents were in fine feather, and the weather was awesomely nice. We stayed on the beach in a dressy large resort hotel, wore actual clothes (not just shorts and flip flops), and lived like civilized folk for a week. If you are ever seeking an not-the-usual-destination destination, put Cartegena on your short list.

 

Panama City (old and new) and the Canal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cartegena old, new, and beachy

 

 

 

From Cartegena, we jumped back to Antigua, Guatemala. Last spring, we had spent two very productive weeks in Spanish language school there. We had been supposed to be housed with a local family but instead we got a student dorm house. Pretty ratty (eg. they served instant coffee, in Guatemala!). So this time we went for an upmarket boutique hotel set in an ancient structure right in the heart of the old town. We toured all the things we had not been able to get to the prior spring due to the daily work at the language school. We also were able to arrange lunch with the aunt of our young friends Keren and Scott. She directed us around the corner from our hotel to maybe the nicest restaurant we had yet been in, Epicur, and there she unexpectedly ran into the owner, who was a childhood friend. It became a lunch of great food and great conversation with two cultured and successful Guatemalans.

Antigua Guatemala - old, older, and our super-cozy classy hotel (where Royce was seen to cut a caper)

 

 

Our trip through the civilized part of Central American came to an end, though, as we were getting anxious to return to Cerca Trova and catch up on the work in progress. We had planned to re-launch the boat in mid-January, so had only a month of time to ensure the project was done completely and correctly, a big chunk of that month was the Christmas holiday week, and there was a tremendous amount of the project yet to be done.

Christmas and New Years in our casita

 

The final stages of polishing and reinstalling all that stuff from the deck

In the end, Arnie's team worked 7 days a week, with the exception of Christmas Day and New Years Day and a couple of days when it rained so hard they couldn't work, and we still launched three weeks late. Not bad for a project that we had laid out six months ago to take 10 weeks and exceptional for any boat project because boats are always full of surprises once you get started and expose what's under the paint. Cerca Trova re-launched on 6 February, literally better than new.