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.

Now that we’ve decided to spend the hurricane season in the Rio Dulce, we’ve come back to Belize to spend some time out on the reefs diving and snorkeling and other things we just didn’t get to this winter, for various reasons.

Things are still a little discombobulated with the blog. So right now I’m going to just post a bunch of photos of signs. Nobody gets excited when I take pictures of them!

And all the pictures should expand if you click on them.

We’ll be away from the Internet for a couple weeks. In theory I can send posts, no pictures though, via HF radio. But in practice, like lots of this technological stuff, it’s one step forward and two steps back. Maybe it will work.
(or like the missing pictures now, maybe not!

And, thank you for reading!

SEWING MACHINE SETUP

While I’m cranking away (the machine is on the V-berth, just downwind of the blessedly wind-scooping hatch, I watch the birds.

We spend several days moored upstream of the one and only bridge across the Rio Dulce, at Fronteras. It’s been wonderful to jump off the boat at will into fresh water, and in this heat it’s a remedy taken regularly!

Upstream is a fort, San Felipe, which had something to do with protecting warehouses of Spanish gold further upstream in Lake Izabel. More information is needed about that – what kind of boats could have made it up, or down the river with treasure without getting picked off?

Downstream is a modern, concrete, 85’tall bridge which carries almost all the vehicular traffic that’s anywhere near the river. All the time we’ve been here there has been what I thought was road work in one spot near the top. There’s a striped umbrella and a truck and usually a couple cars, or an 18-wheeler stopped there. (I just Googled the bridge to see if I could find out when it was actually built, and couldn’t. I did learn that last year during Semana Santa (Holy Week, just passed!) which is apparently a major party time particularly on the Rio, the bridge was used for bungee jumping. I copied this photo from a travelpod user claudia favre)

We’d heard how wild and crazy things can get during this week, and by the looks of Claudia’s picture, we didn’t miss a thing by slipping downstream. The Rio Dulce, at least near Fronteras, is gradually becoming a destination for city Guatemalans on vacation. They build nice houses and buy Sea Rays and Silvertons and other floating palaces, then roar up and down, dragging wakes which probably haven’t been equalled since the last earthquake, and aren’t very kind to docks and river’s edge residences.

I made a comment about the striped umbrella on the bridge to a locally-connected gringo who’s been on the Rio for almost 20 years and here’s what he told me.

“This bridge is a real big deal. It’s the biggest bridge in the country. It took a long time and a lot of money to build, and the entire country, not just the people around here, are very proud of it. What you’re seeing is a booth where people stop to look around, get their picture taken, and a food stand. Yes, it’s a two-lane bridge, with lots of trucks, but people want to stop, and it’s accepted. The other traffic just goes around, or it stops too!!

“Things have changed a lot. There’s more electric, and cell phones, of course. Lots more outboard motors. Even fifteen years ago there was none of that. You wouldn’t have believed this place. An engine in your boat, that was a big deal.

“I know a man down in Livingston. Someone had given him an old engine which he used for a while, until he got a bad batch of fuel and couldn’t make it run any more. Luckily he had the sense to cover it with a tarp, but it sat there for quite some time. I was down there one day and saw it and said that maybe we could get this thing going again. So I cleaned it up, changed out a few things, and it started to run again.

“I got in my boat and came straight home. And you know, when I got back up the river to Fronteras, the first thing I heard was ‘Hey, how you put the spirit back in that man’s engine?”

“There was no way anyone could have come here faster, and there were no phones, no roads, nothing. So I’m still wondering, how did they put the spirit in the news?”