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.