It used to be that Doug reminded people of Crocodile Dundee, at least while he was wearing his straw Shady Brady. After maybe 10 years of regular use, that hat is decorating the head of a mule somewhere, perhaps. Doug’s current brimmed hat has mesh crown sides and a tight stitched cloth brim. Maybe that’s why he now looks like a man known in Bonaccatown, Guanaja, Bay Islands, as Mr. Canute.
IS THAT MR CANUTE?

His real name was Mr. Norman Knudsen, and we learned more about him from a pair of men sitting in plastic chairs in front of a hardware store on the main sidewalk/drag. “Hello, Mr. Canute”, they said. “Good day” replied Doug, not sure what they had said or (in the Bay Islands it’s a reasonable question) which language they were speaking. “Mr. Canute?”

They said that Mr Canute built a house out behind Dunbar Rock. He was an American from New Orleans, who had come to Guanaja for many years, and he liked white bread and beer. Turns out that Doug even walks down the street like Mr.Canute. “The younger Mr. Canute, of course.”
MR CANUTE’S HOUSE
On the other side of the bay, in the little German bar behind the containers on the beach, I started to tell this story by mentioning Mr. Canute, and the first thing the German and a local customer said was “As soon as I saw him coming in the door, I thought that was Mr. Canute.”

Unfortunately, at least for the real Mr. Canute, he’s dead. His wife or daughter still comes down to the house, but isn’t there now. Still, it’s interesting, especially in such a small place, to be mistaken for a popular, or at least known, character. Makes me wonder how often it happens unbeknownst to us, and how Mr. Canute would feel about his white-bread-and-beer legacy. At least he’s fondly remembered.

Or so I thought. Next night, at a party, someone asked me if I was with the man who looked like Mr. Canute. Yes, I am, I said. What can you tell me about him?
Oh he was a real pirate.
Do tell, I said, come sit with me.
My informant was an inebriated German, so he submitted to my grilling about the life and times of Mr. Canute.
‘Maybe it was in the 1960s when Mr. Canute came to Guanaja. At that time you could stake out land for cattle-grazing simply by driving stakes in the ground and registering it with the municipality. Nobody cared what you did. You could buy acres and acres for $500. Mr. Canute took lots of land. Then he started selling the land. The buyers started having problems with the papers, but Mr. Canute had the money. But all this it is okay with the locals, because they are pirates too!”
UPDATE: another story about Mr. Canute, told to me by a diver who’s been here since the 1970s. “Mr Canute was one of the early sat(uration) divers on the oil rigs. There were a couple of them around here back then, and one day I heard a conversation between two of them. He said “I met you at a bouray in New Orleans a couple years ago. In fact, I’m the one who won your Cadillac in that poker game.”
For an update about the dangers of containers, as mentioned in the Kersti post of ?Dec. 1, check this link:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/containers-fall-off-ship-drift-toward-west-palm-200130.html

Put half a dozen cruising boats in the same vicinity and pretty soon there will be a VHF or SSB radio net. Here we’re under the aegis of the Northwest Caribbean Net, meeting on 6209 USB at 1400 UTC, 0800 local time, covering Isla Mujeres to San Andres and Providencia, and sometimes beyond.

There are people who love the nets. I’m one of them. It’s like getting a local newspaper full of information, business, gossip; and it’s always such a revelation to match the voice personality to the vessel if you do ever come across them.

And there are people who hate the nets. I’m one of them too. Endless holiday greetings and blathering on about restaurants and pets, people who don’t listen and fail to communicate, people whose act is not together. Sometimes I find myself shouting at the radio “That’s not what she said!” or “Pay attention!”

So now, I’m the net controller, the mouth behind the mike myself. Apparently I have the radio signal and the voice for it, and, being, I’m told, a bossy older sister, also the training. Tuesday mornings at 8 you’ll find me at the chart table, which has been cleaned off so everything can be written down, pencils sharpened, script propped before me, mike in hand, and as the GPS ticks to the top of the hour, I introduce myself and ask everyone to listen for emergency or priority traffic. It’s all downhill from there.

Vessels underway check in with position reports– today was busy with 12. Boats are going north to Isla Mujeres, and coming south from there; with a new moon high tide they’re coming out of the Rio Dulce; a break in the weather opens windows out of Providencia and San Andreas, and there are short hops in Belize and the Bay Islands too.
“Any relays for vessels I’m not hearing?”

You wouldn’t think it would be so entertaining to watch these little amoebas gliding off across a microscope slide; maybe it’s more like the weird fascination of watching the Weather Channel. We have one of those too, a cruiser who downloads NOAA and other sources and broadcasts the results to the fleet. He’s the single most popular and effective member of this community, although sometimes the forecast and the actual weather are marching to different drummers.
“Fills needed on the weather? Come now.”

Next comes the section called QSTs – basically: what do you need? Information? Parts? Got something to buy, sell or trade? On my days, this section runs together with general check-ins. ‘Wait to be recognized!’

“Jeff’s selling spare parts from his outboard that was stolen before Christmas. Randy’s got a VHF. Are there markers in that pass? Anyone have a phone number for the shipyard? Bob had a ‘4-foot long thick-bodied snake’ on the anchor when he arrived from mainland Belize to an outer cay.” (This is unusual!)

Next check-in, come now. Okay, I’ve got Windquest, My Way, and one other, all together. Windquest, go.

“Be aware that the Port Captain in Coxen Hole, Roatan, speaks better English than he lets on. New green channel marker at West End, Roatan. Is my radio better today? Can anyone carry a package from Port Royal to Utila? To Cuba? I don’t think we got an accurate measurement when we got diesel the other day, and it was poor quality. We’re still here in French Harbor, no traffic. I’d like to talk to xxx after the net….”

It goes on like that for half an hour or so, until “one last call for check-ins for the Northwest Caribbean Net”. I like to imagine people “reading the mail” as they drink coffee, wash the dishes, brush their teeth; plotting the course of their day with the net in the background. But on Tuesdays, I hope they’re not yelling at the radio, or at least, not at me. I’ve done what I can to “facilitate communications among vessels”, until next week. “Thanks, everyone, for participating. The net is now closed and the frequency available for general use.”

Sounds like North America is having quite the winter. Just so you don’t think we’re just lotus-eaters down here in the tropics, I’ll report that your big strong cold fronts drag their tails down here, bringing squally showers, gusty winds and chilly blanket and baking weather. Right now we’ve both got colds.
But in the two halcyon days which followed Christmas, we did some actual SCUBA diving. What’s great about Roatan is how convenient this is – the shore is lined with dive sites easy to get to by dinghy. Some you can even walk to, like the wreck of the Prince Albert, which lies (was placed, actually) in the channel between the two nearest resorts, CocoView and Fantasy Island.
In towns like West End, dive shops are the mainstay of the main street.
In the giddy early days of a regular paycheck (thank you Fitz!), we bought a SuperSnorkel hookah rig, basically a lawnmower engine running a compressor feeding two 40-ft hoses with regulators. We haven’t used it nearly as much as we’d planned, since storage and access issues were insurmountable. In fact, it spent most of its life in our storage shed. Now in Roatan, it’s coming into its own (we store it in the cockpit), but it’s also for sale, and being replaced by our single new BC, dive tank and regulator. We’ll pay to rent the other stuff when a place like Mary’s Place comes along.

from Roatan Dive Guide, by Ignacio Gonzales
UPDATE: As you can see this is a nice dive guide, and a second edition expanded and updated is now available at
http://sites.google.com/site/m%E2%80%8Bardiveguides/
This crevice was formed by volcano, or earthquake? aeons ago and was only 5′ wide in places. We went down to 97 feet where the colors are generally gone but still, the cobalt void spread endlessly beyond.
Another dive took us to a wall, half of which had ‘slumped’ in last year’s earthquake. Probably, at 2AM, no one was there for that experience. And we saw a couple wrecks – Doug’s favorite because ‘there’s something to see, not just fish and coral over and over again.’

 
Or a pair of lobsters.
In case you wondered what the inside of a dive tank looks like: this one is engraved with a story about how it exploded – fire and the proximity of 35 other tanks were involved.

All underwater photos taken by Wally Larsen.

http://www.answers.com/topic/lotophagi for definition of lotus eater – more apt than I’d expected!

There are three Bay Islands of Honduras, of which Utila is the nearest to the coast, and the first one you come to from the Rio Dulce. It, like the other Bay Islands, is part of an underground mountain range, fringed by coral reefs. Utila has signs of volcanic activity at Pumpkin Hill, but most of the island has a limestone base, and is, as the chart describes it, low and swampy. It’s about 8 1/2 miles long and not more than 3 miles wide. We rode around a goodly portion of it on our folding bikes and I had a leisurely climb of Pumpkin Hill.

The town of Utila has two parts: the main concrete road runs along the shore for traffic consisting of golf carts, ATVs, bicycles, strollers, skateboards, and, just to mix things up, the occasional pickup truck or van. There’s a ferry dock; that’s how everything gets here.

And there are restaurants and bars, hardware stores and groceries, cell phone stores and ATMs, all the usual paraphernalia of modern life, but small, the size appropriate to a place with maybe 7-8000 people. Special to Utila and the Bay Islands are dive shops and realtors, both with an eye toward the modern galleons bearing cash in their pockets. It’s a pleasant island tending along the lines of the Abacos, or Carriacou, or Bequia, and popular with backpacker/divers.

Up the hill is the village proper, while the gringos are building out of town mostly along the coast, mowing down the mangroves and clearcutting the groundcover for their stateside- sized casas.  But apparently the locals too have been building for some time:

For more than a century, islanders have continuously augmented their beach front by “making land”. The original shoreline of Utila, only a few yards deep from the high water mark, has been extended in many places an additional thirty to forty yards or more by filling in fenced rectangles of water with refuse and broken coral. Houses that were poised on pilings over eight feet of water some sixty or seventy years ago now sit on terra firma and the process goes on–giving portions of the harbor a Venetian effect–even though the cost is high in money and labor. Land making in the swamp areas has been pursued in like manner, one barrio in the community being named Holland to commemorate its origin through reclamation.

http://www.aboututila.com/UtilaInfo/Money-Order-Economy/Chapter-3.htm#3-Geology

Hiding from a south and west wind that made a mess of the main harbor, we anchored a few days between Utila and a cay-community at SucSuc and Pigeon Cays. Buildings huddle together on crooked pilings over land barely above sea level, and every porch is a dock. This, I’m told, was in fact the site of Utila’s earliest British settlement. Can’t figure out why anyone would chose this damp pied-a-terre when they could have  the hillside, now or then. But I am coming to suspect that the presence of no-see-‘ums had something to do with it.
Another surprise was being greeted in English, a pretty and picturesque form of it. Come to find out that the Bay Islands were British during the early part of the 1800s; a lot of the settlers had names like Jones and McNab, Bush and Cooper, Jackson and Thompson, and several came via the Cayman Islands. Although Honduras took formal possession around 1860, it is said that some residents didn’t realize anything had changed until Queen Victoria died in 1901. Here’s how they saw it two hundred years ago.
Gradually mainland Hondurans have come out to the Bay Islands, but we still met people who spoke only one language or the other. And then there’s a Garifuna presence – these are the slaves forcibly removed from St. Vincent in the 1790s and dumped in the Bay Islands, from whence they have spread to Belize and coastal Honduras. I think they have a language of their own, but use the other two. I tried asking a Garifuna woman for something in Spanish, and as she was showing me, she finally said “Don’t you speak English?”

One of the neatest places I’ve ever seen is a hotel/restaurant/bar called the Jade Seahorse. Owned by, I’m told, glass bead artists from Israel, the entire property is a riot of color and texture, not just the glass grottoes and encrustations, but the cabins and carpentry as well. “Makes me want to go home and get artsy” said Doug. “I seem to be a little conservative.”

When Santa comes to Roatan, it’s not a silent night, and probably not particularly holy either. At least at French Harbor, his acolytes began at midnight, setting off firecrackers and bottle rockets, and cranking up the music. From the V-berth, those jingle bells are heavy on bass, and Santa sounds like he’s in an increasingly frantic race.

Until now, I had been sleeping the sleep of the well-fed. What a feast we had with friends on another boat: G called it ‘Christmas lunch’ although we ate at sundown on Christmas Eve. Turkey, cranberry sauce, roast potatoes, ‘courgettes’, and more. It all looked so nice on the plate and was cooked to perfection. And then, when we were sated, out came the Christmas pudding – nothing Jello about it, but rather an thick, dark, concentrated mound, anembarras de richesse with a primal connection via the taste buds back through Dickens and Austen to the medieval heart of darkness from whence, in my mind anyhow, the Christmas holiday originates. Anything that happens on Christmas day will be an anti-climax to this meal!

Out in the main cabin of Galivant, there are no stockings, no decorations, no milk and cookies. At least I didn’t put them there! I know for a fact that Santa brought Doug a small bottle of fou-fou rum, and for me, a nice chunk of real Parmesan cheese, as he has for several years now.

The weather here at present is fine. We’ll have a swim along the reef in the morning, then another feast; this time a cruiser’s pot luck featuring grilled turkey, the potatoes I’ve been assigned to bring, and more (I hope), plus ‘lots of desserts’. Then this day too will fade into the ranks of Christmases past. To all, I wish the best of the season, wherever you may be.