Land Fall R D

In our last blog we wrote we were back in the river in Guatemala. This is the best place we have been in our boat so far and the most fun. For any one headed this way or any one wondering what it’s like to make land fall in the Rio Dulce. This is the way we see it. First you have to get over the bar. This it how we have done it 3 times now. We have been in twice now and out once. We go in on a full moon high tied. We set up this way point N 15 50. 08 – W 88 43. 89 on our chart plotter. We go to that not the buoy. Yes there is a real buoy here. From there we set up a course of 225 and hold it true as I can. I look at the side of the river where the first hill comes down. I try and remember how far we were from the buoy as we came by and I look back and forward to make sure we are not being set to the side of the channel. We have always found “over“ 7 almost 8 feet going in this way. We draw 6. Our depth sounder is set at 2 feet under the heel so this will upset our deep sounder for a little bit. It can get a little hold your breath kind of thing going on at the time going in but the bar its’ self is only maybe 200 feet and you are over. The depth sounder is happy again in 9 to 10ft.You do need to turn to starboard as the docks on shore get on your quarter starboard beam. You’re in so go anchor near the little fishing boats that anchored there. We use the agent to clear in. Q1300, about $168 and you are done. You and the boat are cleared in for 90 days. No running around.  No taking people out to your boat. He will gather up every one and bring them all at one time to your boat. If they are all happy. You can go to town while the agent does the paper work. He makes about 50 bucks for doing all the work. Maybe in an hour. You are ready to go. In town there is two streets that most of the business are on. This is a small town. One from the water front up a steep hill and the other is to the left before you go up the steep hill. Remember this is Central America. Don’t go looking for a simple bag of ice. They don’t do ice like we do back in the states. There is no ice tea. No ice in your drinks. If you buy a soft drink it will be just a little cool. “Not cold.” You can get some ice in Fronteras when you get there but that because of being so many Gringos there. Not in Livingston. Don’t look for meat in any way you can find it in the states. You can leave your dink at the new covered dock but some one may ask if they can watch your dink. For 2 or 3 US dollars it will be there when you get back and there won’t be any kids playing in it. We pretty much always lock our dink and for sure we always lock our out board motor. A lot of people are afraid to come down here and maybe none of us are as safe as we think we are but we have not had any trouble. We have not seen any one that has had any trouble. Long as you stay in the busy part of town and it is daylight. I believe you are safe but you will get hustled a lot. If you are wanting eggs and they sell them across the street. If you ask and some one shows you where they are. They want a tip. What I like about Livingston are any where people have to work at finding a way to make a living is watching its people. A lot of their money comes from tourist. Lot of backpackers come here. Backpackers means young people. Young people don’t tip. If you are old like us they know old people will. Remember that. There is no road in to town. The only way in is by boat or they do have a little air strip but I have never seen any planes coming in. They have a small fishing fleet here. About dark the little fishing boats, all under 30 feet head out. Remember its stormy every night here in rainy season. About day light they all come back in and tie back to there moorings This is when I like to watch life happen. The buyers come out in launcha to there boats to see what they caught. Then they see what they want to buy. Sometimes there will be two launchas at a fishing boat. They may be bidding on the fish. You can here a lot of loud talk. When they talk loud and fast I can not tell if they are happy or mad. It sounds the same to me. There seams to be 3 types of boat down here they use to work. In the river it’s dug-outs and luanchas. The dug-out tend to be from 10 to 15 feet long.

In the Bay Island they have really big dug-outs made from hung trees. They called these dug-outs cayucos. They’re sometimes over 40 feet and maybe 4 feet wide. Some are old with really old motors. I saw one with a air cooled motor with a shaft straight out the back. You just start it and go. They made a trip to the main land in that twice a week hauling all the plantains they could hall. How would you like to make a living hauling plantains across open ocean in a dug-out log with a Briggs & Straiten motor. The luanchas are ever where down here. They are the true work horses here. They are made of fiber glass with sharp entry in the water but on top at the bow they have a band that wraps around the boat. Helps keep the spray out. They’re always long. This makes them easy to push through the water and the favorite motor is some where around 15hp. The way they are designed they will carry a lot of people over 20 miles and hour with that small a motor. We did a blog when we were here last of them loading and leaving with a full grown “live” milk cow in a luancha. Going to some village I guess. Our friends that came in with us had trouble with there paper work and we stayed with them for some time waiting to see if they were going to get in. I don’t think they did. If you are coming this a way. Get all your paper work done and make sure its right before you come down here and I don’t care what you hear. Get a zarpe from the last country you were in and “you do need one” when you leave the US. Zarpes are your paper saying you are checking out of the country you are in. When we were waiting. I watch people living there lives right in front of us. Like and old man taking a bath at the community washhouse. It’s where women come to hand wash there clothes. It’s not a place I expected to see someone taking a bath. Two little boys came down and pulled out the pipe that carries water to the little pool there where the women stand around and scrub there clothes on scrub boards and filled some water bottles. You have to buy your water in places like this. They put the pipe back and left. Were they stealing water? Maybe? I am sure the officials don’t want people messing with that pipe.

Getting water

Did they need the water? I would bet their mother did. There is always chickens even in town and ever store sells eggs. There always just setting out on the selves. As sure as they is always chickens in Central America there is always dogs.

Street chicken

On top of the hill is two banks and there is a fried chicken place with good chicken. You can set there at their tables and eat. There will always be some old dog laying under the table there to take your chicken bones. 2 small breast 2 legs a small order of real French fries and 2 small cups of slaw is Q83 or about 10 US dollars. Remember you can not live cheaper in the Caribbean that you can in the states. Meat is always high here. Rice and beans and do with out is how most people live. They change there diet around a little with chicken eggs little thin slices of meat and plantains. Fish is not cheap here. We are learning how to cook with plantains. From making them taste like potatoes to making them in to a desert and sweet. I don’t feel sorry for these people because they don’t have 2 cars and a 7 room house. If you are down here long and you watch these people you will see. They are happy. Always clean and always laughing. Reminds me of when I was growing up in the deep south back in the states on a little farm. Kids play outside. Their dogs always with them. Chickens in your yard. Supper not far away and life is simple. Remember we are living with these people. We buy our water and carry it to our boat. We shop where they shop. We pet their dogs and we now live at a marina with out a gate. The owner speaks a little English. She is Guatemalan and is not there much so we have to speak Spanish to the people that work there. I even like that. There is no road to our marina so we go where we need to go in our dink. Like I have already said life is simple here.
This time in my life. “ I really like simple.”

Sailing Back to the Rio Dulce

Have you ever dreamed of sailing around in the Caribbean where the sailing is easy. “Sometimes it is” but not always. This is why a lot of people motor sail. They have there sails up but there motor is almost always running. This keeps the speed steady. No slowing down then speeding up. Get there fast as you can is what every one wants. We would too but we have a motor that has refused to run. We have two. They’re old VW car motors with about 40 hp. We don’t have a reduction in our transmission so we may have only about 30 hp to the propeller. Our boat, the Pamela Ann weights 26 ton so we are seriously under powered. With one motor out. We are hopelessly under powered. This is why we sail as much as we do. We have been in the Bay Islands in Honduras. We need to fix our motor and we are chicken to stay out there. Its hurricane season. So we headed back. We are back now in the river in Guatemala. Safe we hope. On our trip back we did have all three points of sail at times. Boredom, exhilaration and sheer terrier. but we made it. For all that follow our blog to see if they want to go where we have been. When we left French Harbor Honduras. Our first stop was West End. It’s easy to get in. They have PVC pipe there to mark the reef and they do have mooring balls. Don’t look for buoys in the western Caribbean. If they were nice buoys some one would just steal them any way. They use PVC pipe and you do get used to using them to navigate. Our next stop was Uitila . Again the reef is marked with PVC pipe and easy to get in. Anchoring is a little tricky. We looked for a light spot in the water and hoped its was sand. We met up with some old friends we had met in Mexico and he dove our anchor. We set 2 just in case. When we were checking our good motor getting ready to leave the next day, we found the water pump bracket broke. We set another anchor. We may have made other sailors there think we were to scared to be out sailing setting 3 anchor but now with the water pump off the motor we weren’t taking any chances on a afternoon storm sending us dragging. We didn’t want burning up our good motor trying to save the ship kind of thing going on with the water pump off. Our friends there knew some people on shore.  We went there and set up our little 110 welder we carry. It was at a hotel and the owner read the power meter before and after to see how much power I used. Remember this, you can not live cheaper in the Caribbean than you can in the states. Power here is expensive. You can do with out easer here than the states and that is how people live down here. They do with out. It’s a normal way to live. I paid him well to use his power and was glad to do it. Remember the do with out thing. I was glad he let me have any power. How many people in the states will let you set up a welder in the yard at a business to weld something up. Grinding out the crack so I could get a good weld. Sparks flying. We put the pump back on and that motor is doing find. From there we went to Escondido. It’s on the main land of Honduras. Almost no one goes to the main land any more. One thing is it has a lot of mountains near the coast. This means that there is thunders storms everyday near shore. The other thing is some one killed some people on a boat in the little remote harbor of Escondido a few years ago with a machete. Robbery they say. When ever any one finds out we have been there the story of the killing get more gross but no one knows when, who and maybe what really happen. If being away from other people puts you in danger this would be the place. There is a care taker there that keeps up a little trail to the beach. He lives there 2 weeks a month. We have found out this is a Honduran park. His little hut is hidden away so you can’t see it. If someone was trying to rob you there. You would be on your own. We made it in with a buddy boat this time just before dark. There are two big rocks on either side maybe 25 feet high and a 3rd rock a wash about a 3rd of the way across the entrance but you can see it and its deep going in. Remember I have put in other blogs that when the wind has made waves in deep water. When the waves get in shallow water it a washing machine. You will get thrown around a lot going in. It’s nice and smooth inside. After we were anchored up and it was almost dark in came a “Cayuco”. They go to sea in them all the time. It’s a big dug-out canoe some times over 40 feet long and maybe over 4 feet wide. They use them for hard work like hauling stuff to the islands from the main land. When they came in they stopped and watched us for a little while then they came along side our boat not saying any thing. I went out and stared to make pitchers of them and then I tapped my camera like I was sending there picture to some one else. My camera doesn’t send pictures to someone else. As they came a long side our boat they stopped holding on to our boat when one of them said in bad English. We has a problem. We hungry and we got our matches wet. You got a match. Pam ran for matches. We ended up buying some fish from them and they went on to the far side of the little cove there and built a fire just like they said they were going to do. There were fishing net in there boat and they pulled nets in there all night. I was glad we had our friend on there boat next to us just the same. How do you know if they are just poor fishermen or maniacs with machetes.

Fishermen in Cayuco
“NEED MATCHES?”

The pictures from last week’s blog is of this beautiful place. From there we went to the Puerto Cortes. There you have to deal with the Harbor Master telling you how to come in so you won’t get in the way of ships. On the way, we had a line that went behind the sheave on our main sail and I had to climb the rat lines up to the top of the mast to cut the line to lower the sail. We were out to sea and with me having to leave the cockpit and climb the mast, Of Course Pam went a little nuts.

Tim climbing rat-lines to fix line caught in sheave.

We fixed that in Puerto Cortes.

Puerto Cortes, Honduras

This made us late leaving for the Tongue of Honduras the next day but anchoring there is a peace of cake. We have anchored there in the dark before. We went on. When we got to the Tongue it was after midnight and a big thunder storm was hitting lower Belize. Storms make there on weather system like the direction the wind blows. There the wind was right on the noise with almost 2 knot of current against us so the Pamela Ann would not go around the Tongue. Our friends were having trouble too. They called on the radio and said they could hold 330 and were making good on that. We did the same but slower because we had already dropped the main. Too much wind. Our clubfoot jib and for-sail were all we had up. We talked about what would have happen if we had the main up and it was stuck up in that wind in the dark and it would not come down. Pam was not happy even talking about that. We sailed like that for about an hour then we made a turn south to 220 and made the Tongue. Even that was hard with the west setting counter current. We just made it. About 4am we anchored up and went to sleep. Made the bar at the Rio Dulce at 12:20 that afternoon and here we are. Remember dreaming is easer than doing but even with the doing sometimes harder than we like. It’s well worth seeing this place. How old is too old to climb the mast of a schooner under way out to sea. “ I hope I never know.”

In the Rio Dulce

When Pam and I started the blog. We set some guide lines. Mostly we wanted to share what we see and tell it the way “we” see it. But how do you tell how it feels. It’s like making pictures of a desert. It’s not like being there. Making pictures of a hurricane. is definitely not like being there. What if you made a picture of a couple of fishermen in a dug out canoe fishing out in the ocean and a ship was passing by them?

What if you were sailing and you could see the jungle just coming up out of the sea where you can leave the beach and walk right in to the jungle?

How can you make pictures of the trees being full of wild howler monkeys and let people know what that like?

Seeing wild fruit and beaches with no one on them.

I wish we could tell how it feels to be here. I wish I could tell what it’s like to be here on our old home built boat after we dreamed for so long about building it. We have met people that say they built there boat but when you talk to them, you find out they found some old boat and fixed it up. We didn’t. We drew the plains for our boat and would for years show them to any one that would look. Pam would show them to people that didn’t even want to look. We finely pulled a string across two batten boards on a vacant lot in Southport NC and went from there. The reason we call our boat old is what we have had to use in building her. We bought the metal to build her hull new a few pieces at a time. The wood to build her mast we bought new. The sail material to make her sails we bought new. Most every thing else at least some parts of it is old or used like the electrical breaker panel. It’s old breakers off some job I did and they were throwing the old breakers away. I made the breaker panels out of brass kick plates for the bottom of a doors. Our cook stove is a Taylor 30 kerosene stove. We made a cover for a windless for it. You can’t find kerosene any more and it smells so we bought a stove from Harbor Freight used the parts and reworked our old stove. Now she is a happy little propane stove. We like sailing where is cool sometime so we built a furnish out of a Ker-o-Sun heater. Put the burner under a sealed fire box with ducts trough out the boat with fans out of old computers to move the air. Covered the furnish with copper to seal out any fumes and put a cast-iron griddle on the top over the fire box so we could put a tea pot on it, Works great. We built the ice box with a duck to the out side of the hull and a 2nd duck to the top of the stove hood. This way when it’s cold, we can let in cold air and don’t need refrigeration. Hot air rises and cold air settles. We can easily close of the ducts when it’s hot out. For when it’s hot out we put in a small evaporator and a 12 volt refrigerator unit. The lid to get in to the box we built with a glass dish in the bottom so when the lid is on the ice box the glass dish is hanging down in the box. It has its on lid so you can get in side to the butter and cheeses with out opening the main box and the butter doesn’t disappear to the bottom of the box. This works. For vegetables we built drawers with wire bottoms so air can circulate around the them. We built this under a seat at the table with a small chimney to the ceiling. You can’t see the chimney and there is a brass floor register near the ceiling there to let the air circulate. No one has ever ask me why it’s there so I guess we have the chimney hidden. It works so well I wish I could patent it but farmers have been using this system forever in there root cellars. We built our chain windless out of scrap Stainless Steel using the oldest way I have ever seen. The tooth and peg system. You turn the winless gipsy with a handle and the tooth passes over a peg to stop it from turning back There is a tooth in the handle so when you pull the handle back it gets another holt on the gipsy. It is very slow with 6 pulls to the foot but it’s strong and never has let us down. Our auto pilot drive unit is made from a acme screw and 2 timing belts from McMaster Carr industrial supply catalog. Powered it buy a old used motor of off a Sure- Flow water pump. These motors have magnets on the outside and are 12 volt. Uses very little power. We have a Furuno brain to tell it to turn in the right direction. The side band radio was a gift .We were at a marina where a boat was hit with lighting and they threw it a way. The people there got it. Took up a collection and sent it to be fixed. Then gave it to us for Christmas. There is a lot of stuff on our boat that has great stories behind it. The steering wheel, we made out of and old 20 inch SS wheel. We added more SS for handles and made handles out off teak, then covered the outside with a brass pipe. Added 6 more spokes to make it stronger. Now it’s a 36 inch wheel made of stainless steel, teak and brass. We found a new Edison nut for the wheel in a catalog. This makes it look like we ordered it and we have had people say they wanted one. But the thing most people find the most interesting is the base ball bats on top of the top mast and in the rigging. When we built the top mast out of scrap aluminum they looked to plain so one day I cut up a base ball bat and welded it on top and now we have 9 in the rigging. The other thing we have is our old VW motors out of old cars. We made the adapter for a velvet-drive transmission. Now one of them has died.. We have punished it for years so this week, I will be taking it apart to see if I can breath life in to it again. We ran it hot a couple of times when we had trouble with our keel cooler I put stop leak in it to make sure it would not leak. It had little pellet it and stopped it up. Don’t ever fix something that is not broke. With out the thermostat it ran cool. Not good for a diesel. To top all of that off I had the wrong prop on it for a while and I could not get the RPM I need so we carboned it up some. This would not be a problem back in the states but here if you have a drill and a grinder, you have a machine shop. We hope we don’t need any thing sent to a machine shop here. We will try and put a little something about how hard it is to rebuild a motor in Guatemala in our blog as it happens. For now we are safe in the Rio Dulce and it has been a great trip getting back here. With any luck we will be going on after hurricane season.

 

Headed to Sea

It’s morning and we are on our way back out to sea. For all that follow our blog that have never been to sea. This is what it’s is like when you are leaving. “The way we see it.” First you have to go to immigration. You are in their country so they may not speak any English. They will want to know what you want. This time an exit zarpe saying we are leaving there country and where we are going. They will stamp your passport. That was free here in Honduras. Then you have to go to the Port Captain to get you boat checked out of the country. This cost 36 limp. About one dollar and a haft. Here in Honduras they give you 48 hours to be out of their country. Belize is the only country we have been in that told us we needed to leave as soon as we checked out. Most of the time we try to leave the next morning. Up before day light and when its light enough to see how we are getting out of the anchorage. Down here it’s the reefs we want to see. We get the motor started. If it doesn’t start. Even if it something simple it makes you think the hold trip is going to be bad. We always have our dink on board. We never drag our dink out in the ocean. With the motor running we drive to the anchor pulling in the line and chain till the boat is right over the anchor. If you bid it off. This will sometimes stop the boat some times not. We will crank a few rounds on our old home built windlass to make sure we are straight over the anchor then I will put the boat back in gear and slowly head to deep water. When the weight of the boat hit’s the chain it will pull the anchor free if you are straight over the anchor. We never used the windlass to free the anchor and by now you have probably noticed that our boat is the most home built boat we have ever seen. We built as mush as we could. Even the steering wheel. We let the anchor hang down in the water as we slowly head out this will clean the anchor and chain. When the anchor is back in its cradle we always tie it so there is no way it can deploy. Actually, we know of a boat that was going out in the dark in to big seas. This happen on the east cost of Florida when their anchor accidentally went over and anchored them. When they tried to get it back they ran over there line and it raped around the prop. They spent the night anchored backward till day light in big seas when a driver was brought out to cut them free. As I have said over and over. It can get real out here. Real quick. If we know we are going to be more that a few hours in the ocean, we most of the time go ahead and take Stugeron . It’s the best sea sick medicine we have ever seen. The trick is not to take too much. We break up a 75 mg tablet in to 4 pieces and only take a quarter ever 12 hr. We say now that we could not go back to sea with out Stugeron and our old home built auto pilot and its true. There is no way to tell some one that has not been there just how hard it is to hand steer for days. Then try doing that as sick as you have ever been. The only way you can do it is knowing that you have to. To get you out of the ocean. In the US there is always someone taking care of you whether you want them to or not. Like paying a find for riding our little moped motor bike with out shoes. Down here there is no one taking care of you. No one watching to see if you are wearing your shoes riding a little moped bike. There is no Coast Guard coming to check to see if your flairs are out of date. No marine police checking your sewage system and in the US if a buoy light is out the whole boating community goes crazy till its fixed. Down here there is almost no one to call if you do have trouble. Maybe you can raise someone on your side band radio. Hundreds of miles away. There is almost never a buoy. There was one at San Pedro, Belize to mark the reef and there is one at Livingston, Guatemala to mark the river. Both put there by locals. What you have most of the time here is a peace of PVC pipe marking where you need to go in put there by the locals and not the government. Ask a local how to go and they will say look for a house with a funny looking roof. Go straight to it and be sure to turn before you get in shallow water because there are rocks there. When you get in shallow water turn and look for a church steeple behind a house. Go for that and maybe you need to have some one on the bow looking for coral heads so go slow. This is one of the few times we are proud of our old home built boat. If it want do a lot of what the fancy boats will do “ It will go slow.” When you are finely ready to go to sea you work your way around the PVC pipe, I am not kidding. In French Harbor, West End, even the anchorage in Uitila. It’s PVC pipe to mark where you go in to stay off the reef. Chart plotters are wonderful but some times the charts surveys are off. In Belize they are bad, here they are very good. We anchored in Belize and the chart plotter had us on the other side of the reef. You watch your plotter. You watch the PVC pipe and you look hard for the reef. Out side in the sea the boat will always be rocking. Most of the time it’s better when the sail are up. We always plot a course before we go. For the first few minutes you work hard. You set the boat up on its course. Get the sails up. Press auto on the autopilot and then you do nothing but watch. We hear people say they love being out to sea but I say. “People lie.” We have seen people kiss the ground when they come in and they were just out there for part of a day. There are a lot of boats where the men take the boat and the women fly in later. This happens a lot in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. What is it really like to be out there. The wind is almost never where you wish it would be for the whole trip and if you get more wind than you want you have to take in sails. If you get too little wind which is most of the time. You just bob along at maybe 3 knots. This is why most people motor sail. Leave there sails up and run their motor too. This is the way most people sail . They wait on light winds and motor sail. If you have strong winds you have bigger waves. If the water is deep you have waves that are far apart but if the water is shallow, anything under 100 feet and strong wind you have a washing machine. Remember we said we take Stugeron always before we go. You never know what is going to happen. What about thunder storms? High winds and lighting? Our last trip out of here we had a water spout right in front of us just after we were too far out to run back. We put a picture of it in one of our blogs. Why do we do it? There are moments where you do feel alive. The sun coming up and no land in site. We feel safer with the sun up, flying fish all around you, dolphins playing with your boat. Even ships are fun as long as they are a long way from you. I don’t care what people say. I don’t like being totally alone. I like knowing ships are out here. Seeing land on the horizon even if it will be a long time before you can get in and anchored is great. Safe for the night but the real reason we do it is for what we may see on land in places we have never been. We hope we can do it for a while longer. For now the places we are going and what we are seeing there out weigh having to go to sea. Maybe we are the only people that call themselves cruiser that don’t like going to sea are maybe we are just willing to tell it like we see it. If you are reading our blog and want to go cruising but are letting going to sea stop you. Do what we do. Become chicken sailors like us and sail to the nearest port. Let the real sailors sail in to the sun set. We like setting and watching the sun go down with us already having the hook down. We can catch up with them in a few days and show them pictures of the places we stopped. As Pam is always saying, She loves adventure as long as it not enough to scare her. That’s about the way I feel too.

 

A friend bringing us breadfruit right off the tree

city birds

Anchored in Utila

 

Leaving French Harbor

We are leaving the marina here tomorrow at Brooksy Point in French Harbor, Honduras. We will be going back to the river in Guatemala. It’s hurricane season and we are chicken sailors. It’s safe back up the river. It’s about a 3 hr sail to the West End. Our first stop on long sail back. We can make it in a long day all the way back to the river. A long day to us is leave at day light and get there the next day before dark. Remember it get dark here earlier that it dose in the states in the summer. We are closer to the equator. That is work sailing like that. I am through with working hard. We will sail hard if we have to but I like it when we just sail easy. We hope this is why we still feel like cruisers. We plan to stop at Utila, Escondido, Puerto Cortes and finally anchor of the Ox Tongue Shoals. Then go back in the river rested at about 9 in the morning to check in Tuesday or Wednesday next week. There will be a rush of boats trying to go in on Monday. It’s high tide and the tide will be higher than it will be all month. We draw 6 feet and that’s about what it is at low tide. Full moon makes the tide higher. We hope to see some friends at West End but we won’t stay long. They do have mooring balls there so we will take one and not worry about dragging. In most places here where you can anchor it is a little sand over rock. We have met people that claim that if you know how to anchor, You don’t have to worry about dragging. To them I say. You have not traveled far enough or long enough. The reason we went in to the marina was the trade winds. When they blow ,its 30 to 40 every day. You go some where in your dink. You go early in the morning when they are there least for the day. You go in the after noon and you come back slow and wet from motoring into a 30 plus wind. We have a little 2 hp Honda out board for Dumpling our dink.. It doesn’t like 30 to 40 knot winds. When they blow their hardest is about 4 in the morning. That is when people drag If you don’t and they do They may hit you are you may need to go help them. In the dark with the wind blowing 40 for hours. You know how good the holding is some where when they say on the morning net. That is the cruisers talking to each other in the morning on there VHF radios about every thing from what people need to what they have to sell or trade. They will say that you need to leave your mast head light on all night. It’s easer to see a boat dragging. It’s sad to see a boat coming down through the anchorage at 4 in the morning then see it stop then see two boats coming knowing the first boat just broke the second boat loose. We have been here long enough that we will miss a lot that is here, lots of Humming birds around our boat from day light till dark. So many iguanas you have to dodge them when you go some where but the thing we will miss most being here is the grocery store. The old saying that you don’t miss it till it gone works well in Central America. What I miss most is steak. Here it good. Shipped in for the tourist from the US but we only have a little refrigerator so we cant take much with us and it cost about twice what it would cost in the states. When we got here we had not had a real steak in years. In one way . Its good that you can buy good meat and grocery here even if you have to pay a lot for it. But in another way its been hard on our budget. “Let me say this again.” You can “ not “ live cheaper in the Caribbean than you can in the states. People that say that are “living on beans and rice” or living some where you can’t buy any thing. Living that a way is just living. Then you may can save money. We had to buy a starting battery this week for our boat and it cost us 185 American dollars for a simple car battery. Not some big in house battery. Just a simple car battery. This is the cheapest one I thought would work. This is the way it is in all of the Caribbean. You are almost thankful to pay a lot for the simples things if you can just find something that will work. When we leave here we will be back doing what we have dreamed about for most of our lives. Going places slowly and seeing new things everyday but it has been nice even if it has been expensive to eat a little more like you can it the states for a few month. We really don’t like going back. We hoped when we left we could always just go on but there is a lot we never got to do in the river we will do this time. And you can always find and excuse to do something you have said you didn’t want to do. We do have a motor problem. This in its self could be and adventure getting it fix down here. We have always tried to write this blog as close as we can to the way it really is as we go along so we may write in our further blogs how I messed the motor up and how we are trying to fix it. We have two. They are old car motors VW Diesels out of old VW Rabbit cars. We can go on slow on one. As I have said a lot of times. If you are out here looking for adventure in a old home built boat with very little money. You may find it but a real adventure may just find you. We will see as we go back to where we are safe from Hurricanes and try to get the boat in better shape to go on. Sorry we have not been able to get on line lately maybe we have that fixed. Pam took the computer in to them to complained about our Claro stick and they said there was nothing wrong with it but when they gave it back it worked. Just because you pay for something down here doesn’t mean they have turn it on. If we are not on time with our blog this week, we will be on as soon as we can. Every thing can become another adventure down here.

No More good Grocery Store

odd veggies

Last day at the dock