In USA for Christmas

Have you ever dreamed of a white Christmas or maybe spending Christmas in the warm Caribbean on a boat. Maybe a white Christmas on a boat. Were getting old and we have done all of that. We built the boat we live on and when we were drawing the plans we drew in what we wanted in a boat, building from that and a wood heater came up soon so in our dreaming of a white Christmas, there is always burning wood. As I said we are getting old and our family members are getting few and far between. We have one kid and he has no kids so the family is getting smaller. Pam and I have been married 54 years now and way back when, “not on Christmas day” but the first snow fall together we were up before day light and went rabbit hunting as the sun came up. Tracking rabbits in the snow. “She shot one and I caught one. With so many things we have done in the snow now. “Snow on Christmas day is magic”. This year with counting pennies and the dreaded credit card we left our boat nestled in a slip in the river ( the Rio Dulce) in Guatemala and flew to Kansas to spend Christmas with our son but there is other benefits to being up here. The benefits are his friends,“farmers and all that living a farmers life can bring ” and of coarse, hunting rabbits. As soon as we got here we went to the store and bought a fresh ham and hung it up with “the old Pennington family recipe” on it to cure. We may and I think we are the last in our family to still cure ham the old way and make our own sausage. This was something I looked forward to around Christmas back on the farm I grew up on so many years ago. Through out life I have seen a lot of change, one is women wearing strong perfume. In days past if it stared to get to me, a carried a spent shot gun shell in my shirt pocket and I would take it out and smell it. Gun power smells so much better that must-oil to some one like me. Out here I have not seen any women over perfuming but I still carry a spent shell in my pocket taking it out to smell it sometimes. If I smell something I don’t like. With all of this, Pam and I hope all that read this are in the place they want to be this Christmas. We miss our boat some but as I write this there is snow on the ground here. We are cutting a home cured ham in the morning. There is a fire in the wood heater and yes we have rabbit for supper anytime when we want so Merry Christmas to you all “adventures and home bodies a like”. To our boat friends in the warm Caribbean, see you soon. Like they say up here “ baby it’s cold out side.

“Merry Christmas and Happy New Year”

Pam Happy to see snow again

A warm fire feels good

 

 

“Guatemala”

We have the Pamela Ann safely back in our slip in Guatemala now. But what a trip. Needed to finish up some work we were doing in Belize. Our time we could stay in Belize ran out so Pam checked us out and we just didn’t leave. We planned to leave the next day. We checked out on Friday but didn’t leave till Tuesday. Now we were worried the Belize navy may stop and check us, something we have never seen but they are changing the way they treat boaters in Belize. We left and just made the anchorage at New Haven the first day and stopped there to clean up our boat. We had not stored anything away. Our motor we have been having trouble with for a long time wouldn’t run and I was sick. The wind was directly behind us and light. Down wind running in light air is slow at best 2 to 3 knots is all our old schooner will do. We stayed there two more days working on our boat still in Belize waters still worrying about the attorneys. We have two motors out of old VW cars. Little rabbit diesels. The motor I rebuilt doesn’t want to start maybe the cylinders are glazed from running it to hard and too long with too big a prop and I didn’t home them properly when I rebuilt it. The other motor that always runs good now has a problem. The governor seems to be sticking. You almost have to find where it will run and leave it there. We carried the injector pump to the Mennonites and they worked on it and made it worse but they said to bring it back and they would fix it but we ran out of time we could stay in Belize to take it back. We left early from the anchorage to go on (just getting daylight) to try and go on with the wind maybe ten, with us but that soon changed with a passing thunder storm now we had a west wind and we were headed southwest close to the wind as the boat would pull. To make things worse while we were still in Belize I was working on our bimini in the hot sum with the cover over our chart plotter but we think it got too hot with out the bimini and messed up the screen. We could still see a little but the evening sun wiped it out while we were on our way down. Now the whole screen looks like burnt leather. Now we were back to paper charts and an old GPS we have had for 17 years stored away. We made Tras Puntas and anchored in Guatemala protected from strong north winds on Saturday evening. By dark it was comb but before midnight the wind came up from the south at maybe ten mph and gusty. This anchorage is not protected from a south wind and made it hard to sleep. All day Sunday “south wind” and you can’t check in to Guatemala on Sunday with out paying a lot of money so we sat there and bounced. Monday daylight, same wind but hazy with rain. We just had to go on and try and go in. Motor sailing first west then north then west then north then south west sailing like the old days of schooners. As we got near the bar in the river the wind stopped but still hazy with rain. We found the sea buoy and headed in on what the computer said was high tide of one foot point two inches at 10:30am. No wind and no waves. Waves can help some times and sometimes make it worse. We hit the sand bar at the mouth of the river and stopped. I was using a range I always use. The water was coming out of the river at maybe two knots. Water doesn’t come out at high tide. The predicted tide from the weather report was not there. A boat came out to us and we have had trouble with a boat there before with a man saying we were going to lose our boat if we didn’t follower him in and at that time, he would not leave us alone. That time we went on in running the same range I just talked about and if we had flowered him we would had run aground for sure but he still demanded money. He finely left after Pam gave him 5 US cursing us. Another boat came out and told us to wait he was going to get a bigger boat. There is a man there named Hector that is good at helping people across the bar but we don’t know him and he speaks no English. We ask this man his name and he said Hector and smiled. He left and came back with a big boat but we were not going to let him pull us over to heel the boat and bring the keel up from a line at the top of our mast the best way to get across shallow water with a sail boat because he could be just saying he was Hector and not know what he was doing. A few weeks back we got word some one came out and pulled a boat with a line from the top of there mast but pulled them forward and broke the back stay and there whole standing rigging went in the water with them still stuck. Remember me always saying in our blog. It can get real out here fast. Remember this, there is no real law out here to protect you. This is third world. The lawyers down here may take your money but we have never heard of any one getting anyone to pay for making a mess. They just leave. We ask in our best Spanish if he would pull us very slow forward from our king post in the front of our boat on deck like the old schooner and he pulled us across. The water was more than a foot lower where we anchored than it had been in the past. We checked in and left finding a sweet spot the motor would run at and made it to Texan Bay before dark. The next morning we babied the motor and went on to our slip. Have you ever dreamed of sailing away, remember there maybe days like this where your motor won’t run the wind is never the way you want. Your fancy Navigation equipment just burns up in front of your eyes and you have to go on. Remember I said I was sick. Pam says it the wind always blowing up my nose with us always sailing into the wind and sometimes it really seems that way. By the time you read this we will be on our way to the US for Christmas leaving the warm winds of the Caribbean to stand by a warm fire in Kansas. “Home is where our boat is” but a land trip to spend the holidays with family is always heart warming.

Store in Livingston Guatemala

Street in Livingston Guatemala

Dog on the roof is common in the Caribbean.

Leaving Belize, Late Blog

This is sad a little. This is me making my last ride on our rickshaw I built to get around the complex ( or marina ) here in Belize where we are.

Last ride

We are leaving here maybe for good. The government here is hard and getting harder. Always looking for a way to make you pay more money to be here. They say if we come back we will have to temporary import our boat. In the US we could buy something nice like a real nice used car for what they want us to pay for 6 months import fee after that it is 20 percent of the value of our boat and they value the boat. It’s hard to buy anything here so if you buy something and have it shipped here you have to pay import fees. About 30 percent to the government and of course shipping. This doubles the cost of most thing here . If you do buy something here any where in the Caribbean you need to be careful there is not something wrong with it and it was sent here because people here don’t know. I bought some drill bits new some time back and one of the pack of two bit in a pack, all 1/8” all the same bits in one pack one of the drill bits was shorter by a lot than the rest of the bits remember they were all supposed to be the same. You may remember if you read our blog that in Roatain, Honduras buying shoes when we were there some time back, there one shoe was size 10,1/2 the other shoe was size 11 in the box, the only shoes there that were big enough to fit me. She kept saying “mismo” or same in Spanish, saying try them on. “No I problema – there is no problem.” By the time you are reading this we will probably be out to sea. Going back to Guatemala and then in a few weeks we are going back to the states for Christmas . Eating good gringo food and wearing shoes. No rice and bean or flip flops. A lot of the time you know who is coming by the sound of their flip flops down here and all food comes with rice an beans  Here is the new owner of the Rickshaw and we hope him well.

 

New Owners

Sometimes it makes us feel good to know we are leaving a little of ourselves as we travel on. He hopes to make money off the tourist, we have built them before and made enough to get by in our home port of Southport North Carolina. At least now we can slow down a little. Maybe after we come back from the states, maybe even do a little cruising. Sorry for not posting sooner, bad internet, new post coming very soon.

Some Belizan Art