Back in La Ceiba, we arrived during one of the biggest events of the year, the week-long carnival of San Isidro, reputedly one million in attendance from throughout the country. It ended with a parade on Saturday and a rodeo on Sunday. I’m not sure what happens at night, but during the daytime parade people were very well behaved, even demure, compared to, say, St. Thomas.

Horses featured more than I had expected. One of our routes in Roatan took us near a stable where we occasionally saw these artificially pacing horses. It was beautiful to watch, if you closed your mind to how the horse might normally have behaved, and the fact that chains and hobbles were part of the training regimen. The horses’ chins are pressed to their chests, and they prance a peculiar high-kneed gait, flinging their hooves out and around instead of straight up and down, sometimes frothing at the mouth and under the reins.
For the rider, however, the point must be to look insouciant and effortless. A martini in a stemmed glass of course would not spill, although I don’t think these riders drink martinis.
Okay, so it’s an artificial definition of beauty, like women in high heels, of which there are also a multitude.
PHOTO GOLD HIGH HEELS

Men, to appear attractive, often only have to be make money and spend it freely, which seems relatively easy compared to walking funny most of your life!

The carnival was street food

and toy vendors
PINWHEEL CABBAGE

CUTE KIDS

MASKS

BEADS

DANCERS

SPECTATORS

QUEENS AND KINGS

At the head of all these floats are a few people with brooms and ‘boat hooks’ to lift the numerous power cables over the peacock feathers and other obstacles.
AEROBATICS

GAMES OF CHANCE

REFRESHMENT

CROWDS AT THE END

And, the picture I missed, the person who picked the pocket of a casual acquaintance who should have known better than to carry everything in his wallet, in his back pocket. All part of the adventure, folks!
The whole photo file is located here
http://galivant.smugmug.com/Honduras/Isidri-Carnival-La-Ceiba/12280432_Uq4gH/

PHOTO VIEW ACROSS GRAHAMS CAY
‘If you like it here, don’t say anything’ one man told me, and so I’m telling only you select few, sotto voce. It’s sage advice here on Guanaja, where there seems a pleasant balance between the races, as one local told us. He defines races as: ‘people like us’(although others would distinguish his Bay Islandish-ness from our pure gringo-ness), Spaniards, Indians (two kinds: kinky- haired, and smooth-haired beautiful women), Garifuna (who are mixed African via St. Vincent), and… ” I forget the last – maybe it’s any mix of the above, which is where the tendencies certainly lie.

What’s there to do on Guanaja? The late lamented captain of the Windjammer Fantome used to introduce his talks about the island by following the question with a long silence, until people got the joke.
PHOTO OF TOE AND KNOT HOLE
The Ship and the Storm by Jim Carrier is a most interesting book about the loss of the Fantome during hurricane Mitch. After a week-long series of bad assumptions and misinformation, the ship was lost south of Guanaja, in an area we’d sail over on our way east.

In Guanaja there is a good anchorage with great holding – El Bight, and other good anchorages too. PHOTO OF PHOTO OF BONACCATOWN
There’s a pleasant and compact little town, not on the big island but on a gradually expanding little one of sidewalks and small canals, free of sand fleas, just offshore. That’s Bonnaca-town;hold your mouth just so and Bonnaca=Guanaja are the same word. People have a fondness for building out over the water throughout the Bay Islands.

There are a few private or resort cays and reefs facing east-ish toward the tradewinds. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were here bonefishing last month – I saw the video. Even after all these years, they can’t seem to travel without security and constant scrutiny. Diving is another attraction, of course.
PHOTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOLPHIN
This fellow has apparently been cruising this anchorage for years. Now I ashamedly make sure s/he’s not around before I dump my grapefruit peels, laundry water, chicken bones, etc. Of course I try to communicate telepathically, but fail. “What does s/he want?” I asked someone. Attention, was the answer, and the story, how the dolphin found a boat with a dog that would bark at him, until the dog got tired of that and hid in the cockpit when the dolphin came around.

Round the backside of Guanaja, which is easily accessible by lancha and dinghy via a cut through the mangroves, past the airport dock, is a practically empty, beach-and reef- fringed territory. There’s even a ‘hike to the waterfall’ – one of my favorite destinations anywhere I go.

Guanaja has a small population, maybe 8-10,000. There are two other settlements, Savannah Bight on the southeast side and Mangrove Bight to the north, connected by an post-Mitch autobahn of a road for the tiny number of vehicles on the island.
PHOTO COOL BREEZE SAVANNAH BIGHT Mangrove Bight was practically wiped out in the hurricane, and not too many people there rebuilt on stilts over the water. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where people have sidled alongside to offer the sale of building lots.

Guanaja once had more pine trees than it has now. The center of hurricane Mitch used Guanaja as its pivot and a dozen year later the scars are still visible. It has marble outcrops in the mountains, and perhaps because of the same underlying geological irregularities it has a sufficiency of fresh water that the other Bay islands lack. There seem to be a lot of fairly quirky locals of all ‘races’, and more than a few of the expats came here via deep-sea diving on oil rigs, like Mr. Canute.
I met a taxi driver in La Ceiba from Guanaja who sounded like you couldn’t pay him to live ‘back there’, but I like it just fine. Quiet and low-key Guanaja is just my style.
We’re getting to know the cast of characters in Bonaccatown. It’s a treat to sit on the bench across from the credit union drinking from a straw dipped in a plastic bag of ‘mora’ (I think it’s the juice from some mulberry-type tree) and watch the passing scene.
The fruit and veg boat comes about Thursday, there’s a bakery and several supermercados and ferreterias.
It may be the only place in Honduras where dealing with officialdom is ‘fast, free and easy.’This is about where we usually tie the dinghy.

On the shore of El Bight, the anchorage a half a mile or so away, is what I think of as the German quarter. You wouldn’t expect to find excellent schnitzels and spaetzls here, but there they are at the Manati. Last week they killed a pig and used all its parts, although I did not rush to the liverwurst. Maybe next time. I was having a gut reaction, remembering from fourth grade how hard it was to trade a liverwurst sandwich for something ‘decent’, like Susie’s peanut butter and marshmallow.

The social event of the week, at least for gringos, is the Saturday afternoon meal at the Manati, where you can meet several curious people. Oftentimes ‘yachties’ are mere rank outsiders at these events. But here, despite our transience, people remember our names from week to week. And the book exchange is better than most.

Next door is the other Hans’ bar, tucked along the beach next to some storage containers.
He’s another great character, full of ideas; in the orderly German fashion, a lot of them have already been executed during his decades here. We talk beekeeping, cattle-raising, motorcycle racing. Right now he’s building a dehydrator – email me if you’d like to buy some delicious organic dried mangoes, available fresh, in bulk.
Finally, here’s the jail. One day I saw a young man looking out through the grill in the door as I was trying to peep in. Inside it’s like a cinderblock phone booth, best avoided!

PHOTO THE JAIL DOOR

I’m pretty sure chicken exceeds any other animal protein consumed in Central America, by a wide margin. This ‘chicken ranch’ was tucked just off the highway in Roatan, between the propane filler and a paint store.
While we were in the shipyard, plugged in, we ran the freezer and boy wasn’t that ice nice! To fill the rest of the space I bought some whole chickens, Pollo Rey, 2 sin menudos and 1 con menudos,
. Sometimes there is more to ‘menudos‘ than anticipated, as from this Guatemalan chicken I processed last summer.

My plan was to can/jar the meat in the pressure canner I’ve been hauling around, so we’d have something to eat when we get to the San Blas. But it was too darn hot in the shipyard to even contemplate a few hours of steam.

Now that we’re on our own power, we can’t run the freezer without also running the engine, which we won’t do unless for propulsion (one of the secret rules). But we do have a good breeze ventilating the boat. So I’m canning chickens.

First, cook each one individually in the Galloping Gourmet method – submerge the whole bird in water, bring to a boil and let cool naturally. I’m under-motivated to dismember and debone them raw.
Pick off the meat, discard the skin and fat, (store overnight because I got a late start), make stock with onions, celery leaves and wilted carrots, strain it, reheat the picked out meat, wash out the jars….well you can see it’s a consuming project, and the boat smells, sort of incongruously,like the day after Thanksgiving. Seven pints of meat and a good tom yam Thai-style soup was the yield; for dessert some delicious mangoes from a local tree.

Some of the best advice I ever got about boat cooking was: Keep the floor clean, because you never know when you’ll be eating off of it. Next time, I’ll remember to do a little better under the stove as well. There’s many a slip between jar and dip!

The Ships of La Ceiba Shipyard are fishing boats. Probably 95% are hand-me-downs from the Louisiana Gulf shrimping fleet. There may be thousands of these vessels throughout the Bay Islands and coastal Honduras, some fit and spry, and some on life support.

SEA BREEZE SHARK
We had the fortune, not sure if good or bad, to be in the shipyard during the three months that the fishing (lobstering/conching/snow crabbing) season is closed and the ‘fix the boat’ season was open.
These guys were paddling out to work on one of the most derelict of the vessels; on the next trip a couple went back with a big portable generator they’d taken home for the weekend, against theft, I guess.

These guys ripped off the old pilot house and fabricated this new one in about two weeks – a beautiful job. Then they started on the boat next door.

Across the creek they’re manufacturing the little Cayuga/dories that conch and lobster divers use.
The ever-popular machete is used for trimming off the rough edges.

The shipyard has been hot, hot hot, but the main reason for the nighttime welding is simply because there is so much to do.

My theory about the rats who have visited us is that they were aboard the fishing boats until they got disrupted by the rebuilding activities.

Before welding comes sandblasting. The sand is actually “Black Magnum” anthracite coal pellets, shipped in from Illinois in cement-type bags. We are still finding bits of it in our scuppers.

The birds still sing in the morning – we’re right next to a perch in a one-tooth remnant patch of mangrove. Later all the music is ‘techno’: routers, sanders, the roar of the air compressor, atonal chipping hammer percussion.

Osman, although he might not have known it, was our main contact with marina management, and

We also met KARLA who rode in on her scooter every day to deliver styrofoam trays of lunch, $2 each, order ahead. Sometimes I’d call her and through the music and babies crying in the background she’d know it was me: “Oh Dona Ana, dos almuerzos, un cerdo y un pollo, si?” “Si, Karla, gracias”
We learned to stay away from the ‘res’ beef though.

Before we left we said goodbye to the Westerbeke, going home in Luis’s truck. That’s Toby, a fun boat kid in front. Good think Luis came back for a rope to hold the box in the truck bed; when he returned it he said he’d almost lost it on a hill.

It’s been almost a month since the new engine arrived in the engine compartment. I’m sure if we had ever done this before, we could have moved more expeditiously. Carefully modelled (by Doug) and less carefully fabricated (by the machinist) motor mounts occupied more than a week of our time. The air has often been blue with aggravation.
PHOTO MOTOR MOUNTS
Anyhow, the engine started on the first cranking and seems to run just fine. There’s an odd noise from the transmission in reverse, more than a hum, less than a whine, but no rattle or clanking. None of the handful of ‘dock doctors’ could figure it out. We’re coming to think ‘bearing’. I’m sure we’ll get used to the sound, especially if we keep moving forward.

We’ve almost reclaimed our living space from the cabinetry, tools, bottles of fluids and boxes of hoses. Good thing, because our visas don’t have much longer to run and hurricane season’s creeping this way. But we’re still putting things back together, neatening up, restocking the boat, looking for Universal Red engine paint to repair some chain hoist dings, etc.

it’s also been a couple weeks since we dispatched the rat down the river in its adhesive trap. That was Rat Number One. Rat Two was a wilier animal; he/she escaped the glue trap, did a rat-tail veronica with our expensive Victor Rat trap, and began to turn his nose up at peanut butter, in any location. What other bait is there?

No more anthropomorphism from me! This rat opened our foil packs of salsa and refried beans, gnawed at the floor under the fridge, shunned a full strip of fatty bacon, teased us by moving baits he didn’t intend to eat. This rat caused us to stand rat watches, in case the glue trap took a hit, caused us to store our vulnerable foods in the oven and freezer and caused us to move our sails and extra lines out on deck. In steamy April Honduras, we sleep with hatches and ports closed or solidly screened, hardware cloth in the dorades, boards in the companionway.

We bought rat poison, warfarin, (can’t use that word without thinking of my father, who I think was rather pleased to have his own blood thinned by so generic a product). But the rat turned its nose up at the pink pellets and at the green pellets.

So one day the taxista Javier. told me I needed the liquid poison. That’s the ‘dead within 2 feet’ stuff I’d been looking for. But I didn’t know to look in the pharmacy. First Javier bought me a syringe, (15 cents). Then, in another place, he got a little bottle of ‘Rayo’ $1.25 and indicated that at the first bite something would swell up in the rat’s mouth and it would die. I should wear gloves, he said, and wash my hands. But I could wash out the syringe and use it for something else later on!

Everything I know about poisons I’ve learned from Agatha Christie. It takes only the tiniest bit to kill the vicar, the interloper, or the captain. Rayo’s bottle has a skull-and-crossbones, and the indication to induce vomiting and get a stomach pump-out if it’s ingested, but seemingly anyone could buy the stuff without any question. Vicars, interlopers and captains, beware!

And rats too. I’ve got a lifetime (!) supply of Rayo. Today the rat finally started to stink. It must have taken a tiny nibble of an injected Bimbo baguette as it moved it around the cockpit locker. The rat died aft of the cockpit lockers halfway to the propane locker, under a bag of dive gear. Doug grabbed its tail with the ‘feely grabber’ tool and swung it to the river. Tonight I’m going to sleep well for the first night in weeks.