Warning: This is a long blog, covering a few months. Pour yourself a tall glass of wine or pop a cold beer before reading……and then skip the boring parts :-). In our last Rocinante blog, back in February, we ended in Roatan, Honduras, waiting for a west wind so that we could sail east to Guanaja, and then north to Mexico. Our patience ran out before a west wind blew up, so we skipped Guanaja and sailed almost due north…
Our last Rocinante blog was way back in June 2016, and a few people have emailed asking about our blogging (or nonblogging) plans. For the record: the only plan is to blog once in a while, sometimes more often and sometimes less often, with nothing remotely resembling a schedule. We left Rocinante (our boat) last June, on the hard (that is, out of the water, in a ship yard) in the Rio Dulce. Why? Because June is the start of…
[Correction from the last Rocinante blog: In the last blog, I made a tongue-in-cheek derogatory comment about the size of Eagle Ray brains. My friend and oftentimes mentor, Darlene Ketten, pointed out that Eagle Rays have quite large brains. Apparently it is my own brain that needs a size check….] For six weeks, we have been off the dock, mostly wandering the islands of Belize. We have sailed coral atolls, barrier reefs, mangrove channels, open ocean, seagrass meadows, muddy coves,…
6 May 2016, and we are now in Belize, off of tiny Ranguana Cay, a palm covered island covering maybe two acres. The wind is from the northwest at 15 knots, kicking up an uncomfortable chop. So we bob on the anchor, waiting for a favorable wind to head northwest. The sailing life is not all fun and games. Our departure from Guatemala was badly delayed while a boat improvement project—a fiberglass bimini (a partial roof over the cockpit) with…
To spice things up, this blog includes three sentences that are not only fabrications but outright lies. Find the lies and win a prize: a day sail sometime when you are within reach by dinghy. And now, the blog… Still in Guatemala and loving it. So, a couple of days ago, we anchored off the small town of El Estor near the western end of Lake Isabelle. El Estor has a long history, some of which includes substantial violence during…