BLUE SHOES

It’s thirty miles from the mainland to Lighthouse Reef, and no reason to expect anything more than reef and scrubby cayes. Just another strip of mangrove with a few palm trees, was my initial impression of the largest of the four cayes out at Lighthouse.But, as usual, there’s more to the story. Someone tried to develop the island as an ‘eco-village’– may in fact still be trying.

The north end is platted out into nearly 500 small lots lining substantial boardwalks and paths cut through the mangrove and littoral forest. A resort was built, maybe 40 rooms, but apparently it failed within its first month of operations, four or five years ago.

LONG CAYE BOARDWALK
But it’s still there, in pretty good shape, with a big kitchen and a bar still with full liquor bottles. Out back there’s a hospital bed. A caretaker keeps the decks swept and the paths raked. He was going out to spray for mosquitoes the day we met him, but he was a little late!

We made a big splurge day of three tank dives off Half Moon Caye. This site is along a wall with a drop of hundreds of feet, of which we saw the top eighty or so. The coral looked pretty healthy and it was wonderful to swim through the ‘valleys’ out into the deep blue sea. Of course ‘the weather’s usually better than this’ – the whole time we were there it was windy and squally, but not underwater! I imagine it’s really spectacular in the bright sun. The developments’s ‘community center’ has been sold to a very nice young Belgian couple, Ruth and Karel, (from Zeebrugen) who are living basically by themselves out there and running a new dive operation and B&B, huracandiving.com.
With a mainly reliable satellite internet connection they make their business arrangements and order their groceries. Frenchy the boat driver and second divemaster can make the trip out from The Big Smoke in his 43’ footer with 2×200 hp Yamaha outboards in something over 2 hours. Sounds like the big problem out here is iguanas wanting to eat the vegetable garden. And maybe yachties wanting to hang out and eat the other groceries that are so carefully apportioned!

The other national park in the area is the famous Blue Hole. The two parks at Lighthouse Atoll are run by the Belize Audubon Society and are apparently the money generators for the entire Belize park system. Half Moon Caye costs $10 and Blue Hole is a whopping $30 USD park fee if you get in the water.

So of course we didn’t do the dive there, but did ride out with the dive boat for our ‘been there’ credentials. The Blue Hole is a limestone sinkhole 1000’ feet across, about 450’ deep, that once was well above sea level. The dive, a brief, dark one, goes down about 140-150 feet to see stalactites that are angled from being formed during ?Pleistocene? tectonic plate activity. The second dive is to look for sharks which are about the most notable life form in the Hole. But I must say, if you’re not in an airplane, it would be pretty hard to know when you’d found (The Blue Hole) IT!

Possibly, a ‘special’ leaf-toed gecko found only on Lighthouse and Half Moon.

To get there, we needed a pass through the coastal reef. So it was that we found ourselves back in the waters between Tobacco Range and Tobacco Cay, scene of our close encounter with sandbar in February. We carefully, very carefully, since we still couldn’t really see it, went around it, and out the pass at Tobacco Cay, and then back in again, all to create an electronic track we could follow out the next morning with the sun rising in our eyes.

Then we sailed down to the anchorage at the end of the island, single digits on the depth sounder. We ran aground again on our way there. I was actually perched in the rigging and had just said to Doug “It all looks the same to me” when we hit, sand and grass again. “I hate this $%^* place” was his reply. Now we know that there’s deeper water nearer the reef.

This time we weren’t so hard aground, and within the hour had kedged ourselves free, being only a boat-length from good water (good, meaning 3” extra). And then into the anchorage, to find that the bilge pump kept cycling on. We tracked down a hose blown off the water heater, fixed that, then slept, until the wind died and every hungry mosquito and no-see-um within miles arrived. It was awful. I could just about see me clawing myself to death, like a moose in black fly season. Finally I found my collection of mosquito coils from China – whatever is in them works so well it can’t be healthy!

An incoming cold front (still! At the end of April!)took most of the wind, so we motored the thirty miles to the reef, hoping to arrive with good light to illuminate the sketchy chart. Instead we got showers. Putting our faith again into someone else’s waypoints, we carefully maneuvered through some pretty esoteric course changes on the strings of our unknown puppet master until we got to 11 feet and said “Good enough”.

I sometimes get weather info from a local FM radio station, Love FM. They’re refreshingly casual in their scheduling – the news takes as long as it takes, and a couple minutes longer. Sponsors are Shirley Biscuits and a “100 percent Belizean” insurance company with a cheery, earnest jingle. Eventually, the National Meteorological Service at the airport gives their report, which sounds more like what we see out the port, rather than the theoretical broad-brush approach of NOAA. The phone from the airport sometimes sounds like a Dixie cup on a string, although it’s probably the latest in cell technology, but it’s refreshingly ‘hands on’ compared to the machine voice of NOAA’s new Perfect Paul.

There are car crashes, crimes (today, carnal knowledge and burglary), sports ; also lately, trickle-down from the swine flu tempest over the border. The Agricultural Show may be postponed, but the casinos at the free trade zone on the Mexican border have ‘economic concerns’ about being shut down. But mostly radio news is political charges and counter-charges. Public officials read statements or speak at length, rather than being edited into sound bites.

The newspapers are where it gets really interesting, and I’d read them every week if only they weren’t so hard to find. But here are the gleanings from one recent edition of The Reporter (www.reporter.bz):

The Raelians – you remember them? Representatives of another planet attempting to establish better communications with Earthlings? Their leader is a Frenchman, and wasn’t there something about a cloned baby to be born in the Bahamas several years ago? Well, they want to build an embassy in Belmopan, as a place for their alien amigos to come by 2025, and are selling it to the government as a tax-paying tourist attraction. Those who object point out that the Raelians have been thrown out by other countries, most recently Israel, and that one of their basic tenets is that parents should teach their children sexual techniques.

Robberies: four youths robbed a Chinese woman’s house in Belize City, forcing her to open a safe containing $7000. Later, they were caught on the bus, on the Northern Highway. I couldn’t help but imagine them paying the fare. Also arrested, as an accessory, was a young girl, to whom the youths apparently gave the woman’s purse.

Violence: a teenager ‘fights for his life’ after suffering ‘multiple chops’ from a man he was trying to rob. The man, a 50-something justice of the peace, was ‘tired of crime in the city’ and was aided by two members of his family.

Car crashes: first, a graphic description of an accident which resulted in the decapitation of the driver and front-seat passenger. Then another crash, caused by bald tires, accompanied by a reminder not to use bald tires, which are legion.

Environment: 400,000 used tires are being sought to prevent beach erosion at Monkey River. Caribbean Tire has made a donation. Others are requested.

Prison stories: last week, a stabbing with a prison-manufactured knife. This week, six women who were allowed to breast-feed their babies (under six months!) escaped, with their babies, and three more without their babies. One of these might have been the woman recently arrested for stealing powdered milk from a grocery store.

Suicides: a sad commentary reporting two attempts, both by teenaged girls, one using paraquat and the other a different agricultural chemical. In Sri Lanka, the preferred method was to jump in front of a train.

Yacht runs aground on reef: Azteka, a big Mexican motor yacht ?120 feet or so? hit the reef at Ambergris Caye, up by the Mexican border. They apologize, accept responsibility, promise to stay in Belize waters until the $800,000 USD fine is paid. It happened three weeks ago.