With business and maintenance finished, we headed out to the chain of islands that lies just inside the barrier reef. These islands are mostly mangrove – hard to tell if there’s any actual terra firma there unless there’s a fish camp built on it. There are a lot of fish camps, and a few lodges and small, low-key resorts, and some privately owned cays too.

Navigation is a challenge. The soundings change abruptly and not for any discernable reason. The charts aren’t much help either. The data is ancient, scale way big, graphics misleading . So it’s strictly eyeball and dead reckoning and keeping track of nearly indistinguishable clumps of mangrove. But the good news is that the air and water are pleasant temperatures, and you can find a different new anchorage often less than an hour away. And if the weather is fine, clear and not too windy, you can see a lot from a perch in the spreaders.

Our first stop, the Robinson Cays, was a boat building spot in the 19th century but in the 21st, there’s a fish farming operation. It looks well-capitalized. Rumor has it a Swedish group is involved, and that the fry are flown in from there with an 18-hour re-splash window. The fish are cobia, which in my fish book are on the same page as remoras and sharksuckers. They eat pellets made from other fish, so exactly what benefit accrues where, if any, is unclear. Our local informant says the meat is mighty nice, but they’re not allowed to take for themselves.

Our next stop featured a family of manatees feeding 150 feet from the boat, but when I went to visit them underwater I found it so churned up I had a hard time telling which way was up. It’s not easy to photograph a manatee either.

The Fly Range had flies, and the Mosquito Range had mosquitoes (but not many), and Man of War Cay is famous in aviary circles as a refuge for frigate birds. These large and generally solitary birds are known for rarely if ever landing, but I don’t think they can do the egg thing aloft. There are also Brown Boobies and White-Headed Pigeons using this island. How would you like to attend one of those parties!

A nearly universal rule of travel is: “This is very unusual weather for this time of year.” The fronts that traverse the US often drag tails through the Western Caribbean – the front dumping snow on the US East recently at once point extended from Nova Scotia to Colombia. “They” say it’s been very cool and rainy here this winter. I say it’s been coolish and cloudy, sometimes windy, and not from normal directions.

Before we went ashore in Belize City, we took a little dinghy cruise up Haulover Creek which runs through town before turning into the Belize River several miles on. It’s a great way to do preliminary reconnaissance before hitting the ground.
Here’s part of the fishing fleet.

Lobster season has just ended, at least officially.

On land, the downtown area isn’t so bad, small and full of bustle especially when school lets out. Downtown the streets are clean, the shops decently supplied, and reminiscent of lots of towns in the eastern Caribbean. Our mission was to buy a Belize flag which nautical etiquette requires, and the seasickness remedy Stugeron. Both were available, but in the wrong size. You do notice that some shops keep their doors locked, and the others have door-minders or bouncers.
I was sent into the Bottom Dollar for groceries, which it had in good supply, and came out to find Doug lounging in the shade of Marlin’s Cafe across the creek with an ice cold Belikin in hand.

Here’s the good news: people are really nice. And they speak English! So now I understand that plastic phone cards like you’d use to make a call from a pay phone are old technology, except in the US. In Belize, you can send money from one cell phone to another in about three seconds, and be talking to anywhere in four. Seems that having all that land-line infrastructure has slowed the US down in cell phone technology.

The same newspaper said that the price of red beans was $1.25 BZ a pound a year ago, $4.25 now. Lots of other staples have also gone up. The head of state says he’s looking for overseas loans but otherwise hasn’t a clue as to why prices are up. You’ve got to feel sorry for the vast percentage of good people who just want peace and security, and wireless internet!

A taxi driver took us past his wife’s lunch stand to wave at one of his sons. He explained his eight children by saying there was no television to fill the time. Now he’s got flat-screen, and the breeding has stopped. I asked him what he liked best about his country and he laughed and said expansively: I like EVERYTHING about my country.’ Then after a pause, ‘except maybe the government’.

Sunny downwind lee flat calm turquoise: that’s how we got from behind Spanish Lookout Caye to our date with Customs, Immigration, Health&Agriculture and – who was that other guy anyhow? He got the same $20 ‘transportation’ (no receipt!) as the first three, and now we’re good until the Ides of March.

The anchorage off the city is exposed, and little clumps of ‘mud’ from ‘state of the art’ sewage treatment scoot past like autumn leaves in a stiff breeze. They don’t smell and they fall apart like dust when touched, but I still don’t like salt spray on this dinghy ride!

There’s a lot going on though. Here’s what a 180-degree scan of the horizon reveals:
Us, the only cruising sailboat
A chartered catamaran
Small fast (3x200hp Yamahas) passenger ferry (they do their 24 mile run in 12 minutes, so stay out of their way!)
A 138-foot Dutch square-rigged school ship, Astrid. College age, six months out, two Atlantic crossings, the students do all the work. The captain kindly stopped by to invite us for a beer :) but we were waiting for the tide :( so he gave us the short version, and I’ll spare you the accent: when these children come home the parents are so happy they think ‘maybe we will have more children. This one used to sit in front of computer all day now interested in things and helps and very nice to know.’
Two shrimpers, Northern I and Northern II
A German schooner, Johan Schmidt,100 plus feet ‘sailing cargo’ but looks more like some kind of passengers
Cruise ship Spirit of Independence, anchored far out and ferrying in small boatloads of Dive Discoverers, Mayan Ruin Adventurers, Nature Park Explorers and Monkey Village Shoppers (Diamonds International, Del Sol and the same cast of characters as everywhere else, and you have to show a pass if you’re entering from the street, so it’s ‘safe’)
A small container ship at the bulk wharf, being unloaded by 2 cranes
A cargo ship, the Radnor, about 300 feet, apparently in storage
Oil tanker, pinned like a Lilliputian to four corner moorings so it could deliver fuel through a hose to the tanks at the end of the bulk wharf
Two, not tug boats, but maybe 70’ open aft deck and high forward cabin, anchored
A Belize-registered long-line fishing boat
Water taxi carrying 2 palangis (non-native white people) to an outer key
A pontoon dive boat coming back in from the reef
Local sailing boat with pieced and patched sails and a dugout 1-log dory on top.

Looks like I’ll have to learn html to use the pictures right. Later

or Bay-LEE-Say, as the Mexicans say. Sounds more melodic and seductive that way, I think. Here’s the view from Spanish Lookout Cay toward the mainland the night we arrived.

Getting out of Mexico at Puerto Morelos took all day, but eventually the Port Captain got all the stamps he wanted. Unfortunately, it meant we had to leave with pesos rather than groceries.

The two hundred miles to Belize City took us 56 hours, which is a long time to be a little uncomfortable. The wind never really got on the nose, and never more than 20 knots, and the squalls all missed us and the ships all announced their presence early on and the temperature never went below 70 and there was a good moon and nothing weird happened beyond especially ‘devil’ waters from place to place.

But there was a consistent current of at least two knots straight against us, all the time. What always felt like a good six knots of forward progress turned into something less than four. We constantly lurched into hard stand-up waves, and rolled, and slapped, ad infinitum, although not quite ad nauseum. Bulkheads creaked, and the walls of the nearly-full water tanks under the settees pooched in and out, and salty damp settled everywhere.

Luckily, the Milky Way made a stellar appearance, and later the moon, with it’s usual “Yikes!” moment. Next day we heard euphoric reports from the northbound boats “we were flying, over ten knots sometimes, so much fun we just kept going…..”

But for us, southbound, this passage was something of a chore. However our pet ants really got riled up. We’ve had a few ants since we left Maryland, little fast ones, and bigger but more charismatic mediums, with jaunty antennae and perky pointed abdomens. My inner anthropologist was trying to figure out if they were getting together, what their tastes and habits were, etc. If they appeared in the galley, however, I’d casually wipe them out.

In the middle of the first rough night, caravans of ants appeared, trekking single file through the cabin in both directions along the starboard side where the cabin sides meet the top. Like a vengeful goddess (although I saw myself more as a research scientist), I smote them, sparing only those who seemed to be passing messages or who carried something white. All night long, they passed, and I smote, disrupting convoys , until my watch was finished.

In the morning the field of combat switched to the galley, the ants having apparently abandoned the starboard flank. The war of attrition continued throughout the day, as I threw my lightning bolt, pointed my fickle finger, even used weapons of mass destruction such as the blade of a knife in a gap along the trim.

Well, I’ve pretty much got them all, I thought, and I’m a little sorry because I enjoyed their presence, before they got uppity. That was yesterday.

Today, the larger ants have retreated to an undisclosed port-side location, where they are apparently digging bunkers and filling the sandbags, because our Forensics department has identified piles of frass and masonite dust.

“They’re eating the boat” Doug says. “You’ve got to do something.”

So I’ve concocted a tasty, pasty potion, honey and boric acid, and applied it in a place where I can watch what happens. But insects will inherit the earth, so I don’t think this will be the end of it. Meantime, we’ve got to get legal in Bay-LEE-Say.