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Here we are twenty miles up the Rio Dulce in Guatemala. Our GPS odomoter shows 1000 n.m. from entering the Panama Canal, 3200 n.m. from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and 7260 n.m. from Seattle. We will spend the next two weeks getting Alcyone ready to leave here until we return. We hope to travel to Guatemala City and fly from there to Seattle on Tuesday, May 30, but we have not received confirmation of the flight yet. We left the Pedro Miguel Boat Club on April 18 with our crew, Marc and Anders, two young men studying at Magill University in Montreal. They had just completed a several month internship in Panama and were looking for some adventure travel. Marc is from Quebec and Anders from Denmark. We had an easy and uneventful transit, spent the night at the Panama Canal Yacht Club in Colon and set off the next day for Portobello, arriving in the afternoon. Portobello was used by the Spanish to ship gold and silver to Spain and was well fortified against the pirates. It is a very pretty bay with a small village and the remains of the forts. From Portobello we sailed overnight to the Hollandaise Keys in the San Blas Islands. Here we were initiated into the techniques of sailing through coral reefs and negotiating very shallow water. Fortunately, we were successful and anchored in twelve feet of water surrounded by beautiful islands and reefs. We had a constant reminder, however, of the dangers of navigational errors as there was a sailboat perched high and dry on the reef right behind us. They had tried to enter at night just a month before and ran up on the reef. The boat was a total write off. Although these islands have no permanent settlement on them, the village that owns them relocates there for a few weeks to harvest the coconuts. We were visited by the Kuna Indian Chief in his dugout canoe, called a cayuco. He brought us gifts of bananas and avocados, and he invited us to come to the island later in the afternoon. We brought some simple gifts for him and were given a tour of the makeshift village and, of course, the women had their molas for sale. The women dress in their colorful traditional clothes and wear brightly colored bands around their legs and arms. They charge a dollar for each photgraph you take of them because when one of their chiefs visited Panama City he saw a postcard of a Kuna woman on sale for a dollar, so he figured that was what a photograph was worth. Our next overnight passage was from the San Blas to the island of Providencia, 168 n.m., a great sail at over 7 knots in 20 knots of wind on a beam reach. We set up a two hour watch schedule and, with Marc and Anders doing their share, it made for an easy passage. At Providencia we anchored in eight feet of water. After sailing in the Pacific, it takes a lot of getting used to such little depth under the keel. Providencia and its nearby island, San Andres, belong to Colombia. They used to be British and were called Old Providence and Saint Andrew's Islands. Most of the surnames of the people are British and English is the preferred language. Patricia and I rented a motorcycle and toured the island one day, we had a great time. San Andres is the commercial center and Providencia is very relaxed and low key, another beautiful place a long way from anywhere. The destination after Providencia was Guanaja, the easternmost of the Bay Islands of Honduras. Since it was a 350 miles, we broke our journey at Vivarious Cays, a coral atoll in the middle of a lot of water. This time we had nine feet of water depth and it was beautifully calm. We could see the waves breaking over the reefs all around us. A truly unique experience. Here, as in the San Blas Islands, the water was crystal clear and the snorkeling fantastic. We spent two days there and had another great sail to Guanaja. The island was devastated when hurricane Mitch sat right over it for three days with winds at 150 mph. It used to be heavily wooded, but the trees are all gone now. There is only one town and it is not on the island proper, but is on a small cay in one of the bays. The houses are all crowded together along a maze of narrow walkways. We have no idea why the people chose to do this rather than be on the island where there is space. It is interesting to see, but it too suffered much damage from "The Mitch" as they locals call it. The Bay Islands, like Providencia, were once British and. again, the preferred language is English, spoken in a broad Caribbean accent. The three major Bay Islands, Guanaja, Roatan and Utila are surrounded by reefs and are a haven for diving and snorkeling. They were used extensively by English pirates to raid the Spanish fleets. One technique was, through intimate knowledge of the area, to run the Spanish ships up on the reefs during their encounters. The British later settled the islands with people from St. Vincent and slaves from Africa to work the cane fields. These peoples intermarried and produced a people called Garifuna, with their own customs and language. Later the islands were given to Honduras. After Guanaja we visited two ports in Roatan, a spectacular island, and then did our last overnight sail to Livingston, Guatemala, at the mouth of the Rio Dulce. There is a river bar and the channel is unmarked and very shallow. We had directions and waypoints and the minimum depth we encountered was six feet, which gave us eighteen inches under the keel. We anchored off the town and spent most of the day checking in with the officials and getting local money. The town has no roads in or out, only boat access. It is populated with Garifunas who came from the Bay Islands. At four in the afternoon, we motored for two hours up the river through a canyon with 300 feet walls, covered in jungle green foliage and teeming with birds. We anchored off anl island where the river widens into a small lake, El Golfete, and had dinner as the sun set over the jungle, listeneing to the calls of birds and animals. There are hundreds of species of birds here, but the most graceful are two kinds of snow white egrets, of which there were hundreds flying and roosting. The next morning took us further up river, past the twin villages of Fronteras and Relleno where the only highway bridges the river, and another half mile to our small marina. Another mile further the rivier opens into Lake Izabal, which awaits our exploration on our return. Marc and Anders left us to go to the spectacular Mayan ruin at Tikal, seven hours by bus north of here. Anders will go on through Mexico and Marc will visit us again on his way to Guatemala City. It was a good experience for all of us and we really enjoyed having them as crew. We escaped the rainy season just as it began in Panama and kept ahead of it for all of our trip. It has caught up with us here and we have had periods of heavy rain for a few hours the last couple of days. The rain and clouds do cool the temperatures and make it more pleasant. Today it only got to 85 degrees. It will acclimatise us for our summer in Seattle. We look forward to our return to the Northwest and our visits with family and friends. Our address, e-mail and phone numbers remain the same. Colin and Patricia, |
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