Wayne
Hi and Merry Christmas! We hope
you are all happy and well. We are not in a
position to send you a Christmas card this year (which we otherwise
would have for sure!) due to the
fact that there is no post office here.
We are in a little island
group called the Los Roques off the coast of Venezuela.
There are lots of fish, some lobsters, several shipwrecks and almost
unlimited sand and coral, but no mailboxes, very few people, and no
phones.
If you ever need to get away
from it all for a couple weeks we would recommend
this place. It is a short flight from Caracas (in a DC3) but it
is really the island paradise
that you read about in travel mags. The main town
has a small airport but sand streets with no cars. There is approximately
80 miles of surrounding reef, and at least 54 islands inside of the reef. There are probably
a couple hundred miles of deserted, white powder
sand beach and some of the best diving that we've ever seen.
Our last stop was the island of
Tortuga, which was also a fascinating place.
We spent almost a month there and enjoyed excellent diving, many
lobsters that wanted to be eaten
and great friends. Our friends on the boat
Casa del Mar were there and later our friends on Maravida showed up
as well. Art and Corinne on Casa
del Mar are the lobster hunting gurus. On the
day they arrived we nabbed 13 lobsters, clearly an excuse for a huge
feast! Who needs a side dish
when you have 13 lobsters? All of us went diving
one day at a place where the shore shelved from 5 feet deep to 100
in about 100 horizontal feet.
This made it a difficult place to anchor but the
reward was fantastic diving with big neon fish along the drop off and
beautiful clear blue water. The
visibility was truly incredible at over 80 feet.
One day Marc from Maravida and I
were sitting around below when we heard someone
whistling at us from outside. This happens regularly and usually
means that a fisherman would
like to trade lobsters or fish to us for
whatever he happens to need. We
went up above and there was the African Queen.
Okay, maybe not the original but the Venezuelan fishermen use boats
that look exactly like the
African Queen. This one had 5 or 6 guys on
board and they were calling for
a camera. This was an odd request, but we eventually
realized that they had a huge Marlin on board. The fisherman invited
us onto their boat and we took photos of the impressive fish and
the crew with promises to mail
them a copy of the photos. It was over 12 feet
long and they guessed 300 kilos! That's a big fish and they had
caught it on the same hook that
you use when fishing for a 10-pound fish. When
we get to Bonaire and have Internet access we'll put the photo up on
our site. See big
fish photo.
Before we headed out to Tortuga
and the Roques we were in Puerto La Cruz in
Venezuela for about a month. We had left the boat there, lifted out of
the water while we returned to
Canada for a couple months to visit family and
friends. When we got back from Canada, we had to paint the bottom of the boat with anti-fouling, and
then do a few maintenance jobs. We also needed
to load the boat up with groceries and fuel for a few months in the
islands. Groceries were not a
problem, but the day before we were ready to
leave, the authorities closed
down the local fuel dock. This happened because
they caught the boys from the fuel dock involved in a fuel smuggling
ring. None of this will make sense until you know that diesel in
Venezuela costs 3 cents Canadian
per litre, whereas 200 miles away in Martinique
it is $2 per litre. Apparently some local guys with an old shrimp
boat decided that they could make more money in the transport business
than in the shrimp business, unfortunately while filling their hold
with diesel in the dead of night, they accidentally spilled several
thousand litres into the bay.
This naturally brought the police into the picture
and the upshot was that the fuel dock was closed down just when we
were ready to leave and we
weren't leaving until we were full to the brim with
inexpensive diesel. We waited for about a week for it to reopen as the response each day was "Manana,
manana" and then decided that we would try
out the fuel dock 5 miles away. We arrived a couple minutes before
they opened on a Monday morning.
The operators were just arriving and they shouted
out to us that they had no diesel. "No problem, we'll wait."
we said, as we tied up to
their dock. "Oh, the truck won't be here till 10:00 AM."
"No problem, we'll wait." "It could be even later,
11:00 or 12:00." "No
problem, we'll wait." Luckily we had Art and Corinne from Casa
del Mar and Ian from
Gecko with us for entertainment. We got out the dominos and Pictionary
and played games until 3 PM when the truck finally showed up.
We had to pay the extra high
price at this dock for some reason, total cost
for 530 litres of fuel: $15.00! Venezuela is a fun place for money,
when you change $500 you get one
million Bolivars and you're an instant millionaire!
Of course you need a backpack to carry all of those ten thousand
Bolivar notes and oddly they spend pretty much like a five-dollar
bill.
While we were in Puerto La Cruz,
I had the pleasure of obtaining a prescription
from a local doctor. Of course my Spanish is pretty fractured and
the words I know tend to be used mostly in machine shops rather than hospitals so this was a slow
process. First I stood outside the doctor's inner
office for 15 minutes or so before some kind soul instructed me to
go inside and sit at her desk.
As soon as I sat down an orderly and a nurse
began trying to understand why I was there. Since it was pretty slow
going, they got some help from a
janitor, another patient and the mother of
the other patient. After they had tortured me for a while, the doctor
showed up and I got to go
through the entire process again with all six of them
pitching in to keep me honest. Eventually the doctor decided that she
knew what my issue was, and so
she asked "Why was I in her office?" It turns
out that in Venezuela, there is rarely (or perhaps never) a need for
a prescription if you know the
drug that you want, you just go directly to
the pharmacy.
Our biggest excitement of the
last 6 months came in July while in Grenada,
the southernmost island in the
Caribbean island chain. The insurance
companies say that Grenada is
South of the hurricane zone so many boats go there to wait out the season. In
2004 that went badly wrong when Hurricane
Ivan made a direct hit as a
Category 3 storm with something like 150 MPH
winds. It put dozens of boats up
on the rocks and knocked hundreds off
their stands in the boatyards
and sank many more. The number of damaged
and destroyed boats was
staggering. It was probably even worse for the
locals, we've heard that every
single building on the island had damage
and over 90 percent of roofs
were lost. Roads were badly damaged, trees
knocked down, the nutmeg crop
destroyed for seven years and the cocoa crop
destroyed for two. This
was their first hurricane in 50 years so it
caught both locals and boaters
by surprise.
We were further north in the
Tobago Cays when a low pressure system
started to form out in the
Atlantic. We decided that we should push south
to Grenada where it was less
likely to hit should it develop into a
hurricane. But fate had other
plans for us. We arrived on July 12th and
Hurricane Emily scored a direct
hit on us in the middle of the night on
the 13th. It was still just a
tropical storm only hours before it reached
us but in those last few hours
it wound itself up to almost a Category 2
hurricane with winds of 80 knots
and gusts to 100 knots. I can tell you
that that's more wind than we
ever care to encounter again.
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We knew that it was coming so we
had lots of time to prepare, which meant
getting all of the sails down
below and putting out four anchors. We had
found a small bay in Clarks
Court that had only one other boat anchored in
it. This seemed like a good
choice to us because we normally think that
the greatest danger comes from
other boats that are not well anchored.
Many people in the Caribbean
anchor their boats very close to shore and
tie one end into the mangrove
trees when there is a storm coming. We had
never seen this done before and
thought that we'd be safer with multiple
anchors several hundred feet
from the nearest shoreline. A few hours
before the first strong winds
were forecast to arrive, a very beat up boat
which was in the middle of being
repaired from last year's Ivan damage,
came in and anchored fairly near
us and directly upwind in the direction
where we expected to get the
worst winds. This was a very bad outcome for
us but it was much too late for
us to think about moving. We watched this
boat for a while and when it was
clear that they intended to make no
preparations I decided to go
suggest some. I would be very cranky with
anyone who came to give me
advice, but I was glad to have done it in this
case, because the old guy on
board was a disabled Vietnam vet named Ted
and he really couldn't get his
work done alone. We got his sails down and
discussed strategies, the main
ones being that he would motor into it if
he needed to and I'd be shining
a searchlight on him if he seemed to be
dragging.
The hurricane hunter planes were
flying through the storm (we believe we
saw one) and reporting that it
had internal speeds of 80 knots with gusts
to 100 knots and forward motion
of about 17 knots. This means that if you
are on the North side, you could
experience 97 knots of wind and the south
side should see about 63 maximum
and if the eye goes over you should see
about 80. These are all
dangerous wind speeds for us. We thought that we
should have Tropical Storm force
winds (35 to 64 knots) by about 8 PM, but
it stayed pretty quiet until
around 11. By around 1 we had hurricane force
winds from the East and Ted was
dragging toward us. We flashed a
searchlight on his boat and
eventually he started his engine and began
motoring into it to take the
strain off his anchors. Sometime shortly
after that the wind began to
move around to the North and get lighter
which seemed to indicate that we
were South of the eye or possibly in the
eye. Suddenly the wind began to
hammer us from the West, much higher than
we had had from the East to the
point that you could not open your eyes
while looking into it or stand
upright on deck. We put on snorkels and
masks and were able to see a
little bit. Ted was forgotten since he was
now downwind and no longer a
danger to us, but the small unattended boat
that had been in the bay when we
arrived was dragging down toward us at a
high speed. I raced back to the
cockpit and screaming at the top of my
lungs to be heard over the wind
told Susan to start the engine and try to
dodge the boat, meanwhile I
crawled back on deck to move fenders to the
appropriate side and try to keep
a light on the boat so she could see
where to steer. For hours we
dodged this boat although the control was
very minimal with so much wind
and no visibility. At one point it was
within 15 feet of us and neither
of us could see how we were going to come
out of this without some damage.
Eventually we caught one of our own
anchor lines in the prop, cut
it, wound it up on the prop shaft and were
unable to use the engine.
Although this was a bad thing, the wind had
started to drop and the small
boat seemed to have settled a few yards away
so the timing could have been a
lot worse. By dawn the wind was down to
tropical storm force and by
about 8:30 things were improving. We spent the
next couple days putting the
boat back together and diving for the lost
anchor, which we never found.
The diving was interesting for me as I have
never scuba dived before. The
local dive shop didn't care if I was
certified as long as I had cash
and a friend on another boat gave me a
quick 15-minute dive course. The
visibility in the water was terrible but
it was a cool experience to go
underwater and stay there essentially as
long as I wanted.
Ted had motored into the storm
all night long dragging his two anchors
along. Since he has an inside
steering station and radar this worked
pretty well for him. Our friends
on another boat had tied up in the
mangroves a few hundred yards
away and had a pretty easy time of it. The
big danger for them would be
getting hit by a runaway boat but things were
out of their hands once the
storm began. We had other friends tied in the
mangroves on another nearby
island. They were driven up into the mangroves
by the storm and had to get a
tow to get the boat off, but they suffered
very little damage other than to
their paint. In the future we plan to go
into the mangroves if that
option exists, although we hope to never find
ourselves in the path of a
hurricane again.
After the storm, we rented a car
and drove around a little on the island.
Hurricane Ivan, the year before,
was obviously a lot worse, but there was
still plenty of damage from this
storm. Many of the roofs that came off
last year were only partially
repaired and so they came off again this
year and especially at the North
end of the island there were a lot of
trees down. We passed over
several bridges that were completely plugged on
the upstream side with fallen
trees and detritus and had floods pouring
over the road. It looked like
there was some chance that the bridges might
collapse.
After we last wrote in June from
Antigua we moved fairly quickly down the
eastern Caribbean island chain
stopping at most of the islands such as
Guadeloupe, Isles des Saintes,
Dominica, Martinique and Bequia. We enjoyed
the Grenadines in the southern
section the most. Here we were finally
introduced to some of that
famous Caribbean underwater scenery. This was
our first experience with such
colourful and varied coral reefs.
We've continued to enjoy
world-class snorkeling throughout the Venezuelan
islands. It is hard to put into
words how spellbinding it is to float
through grottos of enormous,
colourful coral of so many shapes and
varieties. At times you feel
that you've been dropped into a giant
salt-water aquarium that is
stocked with every conceivable tropical fish.
There is so much life to see
especially in the Venezuelan waters. Here
we've had to get used to that
feeling that you are being followed around
as the curious barracuda laze
along behind you. There are also close
encounters with turtles, rays,
conch, squid and of course, the elusive and
tasty lobster. The tiny little
angel fish can be the most amusing as these little 4 inch fish take a run at
you to scare you away from their
well-protected homes.
One of the greatest improvements
in our cruising life this time around is
the ability to keep in contact
with friends and family back home. On our
last trip, we wrote a lot of
letters sent by 3rd world snail mail and
spent a lot of time crowded
around a pay phone having difficult
conversations over bad
connections. Now you can find an internet café in
almost any sized town and
wireless internet connections are becoming more
and more common in and around
anchorages and marinas. Recently we
discovered the joy of Skype (www.skype.com),
which allows us to have phone
conversations with family using
our laptop and a microphone headset any
time that we are near enough to
civilization to have a high-speed internet
connection. These calls cost
only 2.5 cents Canadian per minute if we call
a land phone and are free if we
call directly to another computer. It is
really a fantastic service.
To see photos
from the Windward Islands, click here.
To see photos
from Venezuela, click here.
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