It’s a Small World

Dockside

We disgorged off of Williams Shuttle at The Moorings, a little marina in Placencia, where we were met by Diego. Diego is a study in that he never opens his mouth far enough for his teeth to come apart while he’s talking. Very fascinating. We were led to our boat and the luggage arrangements commenced. Most people lit out for the supermarket asap as we needed to stock the ship for our week long journey. The supermarket was almost a mile away, and our only mode of transportation was legs. We were extremely happy that our boat had a water maker and RO system so we didn’t have to pack a thousand liters of water that far.

Sailing in Belize is a different animal from any of our other sailing grounds. There’s very few bareboat (no skipper) charters and you must come with a decent resume. Whereas in Greece you do a little pre-trip paperwork, send in a pic of your Certificate of Proficiency and they hand over the boat keys and wave you exuberantly off, here it’s a touch different.

Paperwork, on and on for the skipper, then each guest creating their own Sunsail account so they could watch required safety videos. Even Caspian needed his own. Belize waters are considered Level 3 Sailing. They were last partially charted in 1989 and the charts haven’t really been updated since then. Meanwhile new islands have sprung up, coral has moved and shifted and the channels have subtly changed. We had tried to do our usual pre trip studying with charts and pilot books, but the charts were outdated and the only pilot book available was a second hand one on Amazon for $416. There isn’t even a lot written by other sailors in forums to fall back on. Nothing. Needless to say we felt fairly unprepared when we first stepped onto the boat.

Sunsail held a briefing for the Skippers on the morning of the sail, so we got some of our questions answered there. They went over some of the charts and showed us where things had changed and where it was generally safe. We each got a ratty copy of Captain Freya Rauschers book with its hand drawn charts showing lines from Caye to Caye and what your compass reading should be to avoid peril. I spent hours during the journey pouring over that book, trying to find anchorages for night and safe paths from A to B.

The biggest threat to our boats safety was coral heads. These are bits of coral that can sprout up in deep water and are rock hard. You can’t really tell how deep they are, nor can you see them at all in poor lighting. We had to post a lookout on the bow when we went through squirrely spots and just hoped for the best. Mostly we avoided such spots entirely, but as you can see by the chart above, that’s a little difficult. Most of the green is reef just under the surface, all the red x’s are approximate danger spots, give or take 100ft, and numerous coral heads means post a lookout.

This is supposed to be helpful, and maybe is, but sometimes dark means not deep but grassy. And sometimes white means 30ft deep but sand on the bottom. When the surf is up the reef edge is not light blue, it’s a boisterous area.

I’m sure there was a logical explanation, but for reasons unknown the depth finders had been calibrated so when they showed a depth of 0.00ft you still had 2ft of water under your keel. But they didn’t show negative numbers. Very disconcerting, for when you were in the trickiest situations you were literally sailing blind. When questioned on that in the briefing, Diego said, with his teeth firmly together, “so then you know, even if it says 0 you can keep going”. Huh?! Sure would be nicer if a depth finder’s yay was yay and nay was nay.

Launched

Our days fell into an easy pattern. Eat breakfast, snorkel, sail to some other snorkeling spot as marked in Captain Freyas book, lunch while underway, snorkel some more, afternoon tea/drink, sail to night anchorage, explore area with dink, supper, loud fish facts by Avril, relaxing and bed. Per Sunsail’s rules we had to be anchored by 16:00 every day because of visibility. That definitely kept the stress at bay, but it also kept the sailing at bay too. Contrarily, the winds would pick up around supper time and blow steadily through the night, fizzling out around 10:00am. Then the dead calms would hit and we’d sweat and motor and be extremely grateful for our three fridges with their cold drinks. There really isn’t much else to do out there besides snorkel. The islands are pretty tiny and inaccessible, most covered in mangroves, while others were privately owned. A few had restaurants/resorts you could make reservations to eat at, but nothing other than that to do ashore.

We did get the sails up a few times, but it wasn’t much. Docking practice was nil, but we got plenty of anchor practice. The boat was spacious, which was a very good thing as we literally couldn’t get away from each other. No hikes, little towns to explore, quays to tie up to or history to absorb. Nope. It was sunshine, sunscreen and saltwater absorbed this time. And delicious drinks by Avril, served with a flourish of course. It was dinghy rides and stargazing. And for me, the ever present low key fish phobia that haunts me.

Snorkeling is amazing. It also has a learning curve, as observed in several of our party. Namely a certain father and son who seemed to share similar panic genetics. At one point I looked on amazed as they both were hanging over the side of the dinghy, coughing and spitting, wild looks in their eyes. Heath was bleeding from coral scrapes and Forrest looked mad enough to boil the water around him. Brooke was helplessly laughing, bless her heart, and I was, well, unsure how to feel. They had been in a bit rough water, and the coral had suddenly got shallow. Add water suddenly whooshing into your mouth piece and a leaky face mask, and you have a perfect storm of panic. No place to stand without crushing something precious, hideous fish all around… it is discombobulating. I will say this didn’t last long. They both got the hang of it and one shaved his mustache to make the mask more watertight. I, on the other hand didn’t worry at all about the breathing or water. I had snorkeled before a little. I worried about those horrible fish. Fish give me the absolute pip. I do not under any circumstances want them to touch me. I do not want to touch them. I do not want to look them in the eye. I do not want them to flick so much as a tail against me. No. They can be there, but they must respect my personal boundaries.

This isn’t always possible in Belize. Staying far from fish. As we wound our way North through the cayes towards South Water Caye and the Tobacco Range, then back South and eventually ending up at Pompeon Caye, we had plenty of opportunity to touch fish. Sometimes the coral was seriously shallow and you had to swim with awkward strokes to avoid touching it. Other times it was blissfully deep and I watched with relief as the fish stayed far away. Every evening Avril would be found researching fish, making notes of new interesting ones we had seen that day and regaling us with unusual facts. She always posted her lists on the chat.

She did eventually loose steam, as the new things kept coming and it started to be confusing if we had seen something before or not. I will be honest, I didn’t identify many. To me they were all just amazing colorful fish. Her and I enjoyed the octopus, Avril teasing it with a stick, trying to steal its conch treat, both of us leaping and screaming when one of his arms snaked out and snapped the stick in half. We did get the shell in the end. I definitely identified the two lobsters peering up at me from under a rock, their long tendrils waving in the sea, and of course rays and starfish are hard to miss. Little nurse sharks liked to swim around our boat at night and we’d watch them as they swam in and out of the area lit by our nifty underwater lights. We also got our jollies out of the needlefish. They are sticklike fish that are extremely abundant and swim in schools near the surface. But every now and then one will put on a tremendous burst of speed and it’ll go shooting out of the water and skip along the surface, just like a skipping stone, for ages! It took us awhile to figure out what they were. Looked bonkers. Heath and I were also completely shocked by all the conch shells lying about in the water. As children, we’d both had this long held, improbable hope that we would find a perfect conch shell on the beach. A big one. Now suddenly there was not just one but rather thousands of them littering the seabed. And by some cayes there were huge conch piles, so big they were charted back in 1989. “Conch pile to the south” the chart would read. Unbelievable. And I had no idea they were edible. Just our luck it was conch season and we ordered Conch Ceviche at the one and only restaurant we ate at. It’s a tad rubbery but the ceviche was delicious. I was gonna bring a big conch home, but I was trying to hold it and tease the octopus at the same time. You sorta need both hands to battle waves and stay in the same spot and it didn’t take me long to decide what was more important, keeping a good grip on the shell or staying above the octopus. The shell had to go.

Climax

And then it was Thursday, our last full day on the boat. We were all getting picky with our snorkeling, no longer sticking around if it was anything less than prime. Heath decided we’d go to Pompion Caye as it is also a fishing camp and that apparently drew in some bigger critters like sharks and stuff. By this time my nerves were almost shot. So many fish had swam before my eyes all week and I was pretty much to the end of my brave streak. Regardless, we anchored in the tricky waters and one by one plopped into the water. The coral was pretty, but it was a little cloudy. And then we started to get caught in clouds of teensy weensy jelly fish and that had me hightailing it to the boat, Brooke hot on my heels. She got a nasty sting on her leg from one of the little stinkers. Rob’s and Caspian had gone to the beach so we decided to join them there and maybe just snorkel around in the little reef surrounding the caye.

As you can see on the chart, Pompion is tiny. The green is all underwater reef and excellent snorkeling. The inner harbor is about 4ft deep, so we had to anchor just back from where the actual anchor pic is. We dropped our hook about right between the green bits. This seems boring, but it’s important for later in this story.

There was a fishing boat pulled up to the beach and a couple families were messing around cleaning fish and playing in the water. We all struck out in our own directions, some on the beach, others in the deeper water outside the reef. I struck off to where the chart incorrectly says Palm Trees. There’s definitely no palms there. I was idly paddling along in about 15ft of water, nerves zinging when suddenly, looming in the slowly darkening water ahead the form of a big shark appeared. My heart is pounding as I write this. It was bigger than me and forever printed on my mind are its gills. Right there. Right in front of me.

I never once thought to bop it on the nose, or remembered that splashing could make me look like food or even to look at it closely to see what make and model it was. I had one thought and that was ESCAPE! I wonder if I looked like a needlefish as I swam desperately for the relative safety of the inner harbor. I yanked my snorkel out and screamed and screamed “shark”. I fully expected to feel a big chomp on my foot at any time and accelerated even more. Everyone heard me. The people on the island, the people on the sailboat and did anyone come rushing to the rescue? No. Avril and Brooke looked at me and asked me why I had scared it away? “That’s not very thoughtful” they told me. I tried to explain it had nearly eaten me, but they didn’t seem to get it. About that time an enormous manta ray came floating right past us and I clutched Avril so hard I nearly tore her arm off. Whether she believes it or not, she clutched me right back. I could see they still weren’t really understanding just how big my shark had been, as up until this point we really had just been seeing the sweet little nurse sharks. But I let them go off to hunt, and I forced myself to check maybe just a teeny bit in a different direction for it. And what do you know, there was another shark, but this time in was just a big nurse shark. Really big for a nurse, but not big compared to the one earlier. Regardless, I was done. Totally done. Fin. Amen. It was time I took over babysitting duties on the safe and warm sand. “I saw a massive shark” I informed the fish cleaning lady. She asked what kind and I said I didn’t know exactly but it was one that ate people. “That would be very unusual, but not impossible” was her kind reply. And then I went to join Caspian where he was drinking sea water out of his little cup and dipping his pacifier in the sand. He loved to float in his life jacket and I started to slowly decompress. Something brought us to the rocks beside the beach where the water lapped up and would you believe it. An eel was caught in the rocks, writhing, twisting and causing me to shriek all over again. If fish are bad, eels are next level. This crisis was shortly followed by another massive manta ray gliding by in the shallows, almost over my feet. Honestly. How many frights can a girl handle before she just up and dies?

I was happy to go back to the boat. Happy to be out of the creepy depths. I was also starting to wonder if I had imagined the shark. No one else had seen it, and Avril said she’d seen a big nurse shark so that was probably it. Deep down I didn’t believe it. I know what nurse sharks look like. This was not it.

Later at home I looked online and found that a Bull Shark most closely matched my memory. They are found in that area occasionally, lots of times 20 miles to the south of Pompion, and they do occasionally attack people. They also don’t stick around when there’s snorkelers, so it would make sense no one else saw it. Nurse sharks and Caribbean Reef sharks are curious and often make a couple circles. But I’ll never know. I’ll never know if a week of low key panic culminated in a nurse shark turning into a giant people eater, or if I truly had a magical, if a little hysterical, encounter.

We had been too far offshore for cell phone service all day, and that made it a bit difficult to figure out our night anchor plan. You really want to know what direction the wind and swells will be from so you know how to plan your swing. There really wasn’t any good anchorages in the area, and after 6 days of steady NE trade winds we decided that staying tucked behind Pompion would probably be our best bet. “One thing we know for sure, I proclaimed, is that there won’t be a SW wind”. I should have heard that tiny “ahem” from fate.

Predictably the wind kicked up at supper time, sending uncomfortable swells rolling under us and buffeting our boat. Heath was keeping a close eye on the gps and about 20:00 he noticed our anchor was dragging. Not bad, but a little. We realized we would have to throw out a second anchor if we wanted to sleep at all and to do that would require resetting our current one. That sounds straightforward, but it isn’t. We puzzled out a way to rig the second anchor, how to feed the lines out evenly and where we should throw it from to be the most effective. As per the chart above, you can see that we had very little anchoring margin. We had to get between the reefs, but not into the harbor. And we also had to make it so should the storm send funny swirling gusts, we wouldn’t end up on the reef. Not shown on the chart is another reef, just south of us. When all our lines were laid, the massive 2nd anchor struggled to the side and in a ready position, we prepared to lift our other anchor. This is where it started to get hairy. The wind was howling by this time and the sea was rough. It was black as pitch outside, so you literally had no sense of direction at all. It’s 99% impossible to stay oriented in that situation. Heath knew on the gps where he needed to get the boat, but to actually do it was quite another matter. And there was very little error margin. We wiggled uncertainly around a little, the disorientation only rising until Rob shone our brilliant torch light onto the island. By keeping that illuminated, we could see just enough that with Heath moving the controls and me keeping him appraised of the islands location we could ease into our new drop position. We dropped the anchor into the black water, waiting while we backed a little and then the men with big muscles chucked the second one overboard. Thank goodness for muscles.

We were enormously relieved when they both pulled tight and we could go inside for some much deserved tea. But we still didn’t trust the situation, not really, and we deemed it necessary to have someone check the gps every hour to see how we were sitting. Any problems and they’d bang on the Captain’s door.

Avril and I had the 22:00 and 23:00 watches and somehow neither of us went to bed. It visits so great, sitting out in the blackness and wind, and when Heath’s watch came at 24:00, we were still up there. Things had slowed down a little weather wise and I wondered aloud if we could maybe cancel the watches. The wind had clocked to the N and we were swinging a little different, but still safe. I hoped when Forrest came on watch he wouldn’t panic since it looked liked we’d moved but we hadn’t. And so we went to bed, leaving the anchor to its own devices for a few minutes.

I sort of dozed, but heard the rain storm that passed through and felt quite cozy. The next thing, we were rudely awakened by a pounding on our door and a call for “Captain”. “He’s probably overreacting” I told Heath, placing my faith in the trade winds.

He was not overreacting. In defiance of my claims, the wind had indeed shifted directly to the SW and we were now swinging straight at the island. Shining the light on it, it felt like the palm trees were practically looming over us. It was still deep enough under us, but the anchors had not been set for this angle at all. A massive gust of wind could potentially uproot them and send us bumping into the rocks.

Let’s just say none of us slept well. I popped up at the change of each watch to check on things and out of curiosity. No more storms passed and we stayed steady. Morning brought a droopy crowd up and no one seemed inclined to dash about. The plan was to check out the jellyfish snorkeling area quick before heading back to Placencia and port. Weirdly, I had zero intention of getting back in that fishy water. Sadly, I had to babysit and keep a continued anchor watch. It simply wasn’t my turn to snorkel. No, Rob’s needed one last chance. And Heath. And we were one snorkel short and it was Heaths turn to use mine. I happily changed a poopy diaper. Happily tidied. Happily watched the anchor. Happily played “see if you can stop me from touching the breaker switches” with Caspian. Happily sang loud songs while he fell asleep in my arms. Man, I miss that kid.

And then it was throwing the snorkel gear into the storage lockers for the last time and heading back to Placencia. We ate and drank as much as we could to use up excess supplies. Avril made us horchata drinks, coffee drinks and Pina Colada’s. We were out of limes to embellish the cup rims, but a cucumber works in a pinch. Hey, it’s green. We had a small memorial for the salty pasta while tossing the leftovers into the sea. “From salt thou came, to salt thou shalt return”. Note to Avril: if you’re gonna cook pasta in seawater, do not listen when Jeanie sends you off to swim saying she’ll watch the pasta. She will turn the burner off and promptly forget about it. It will absorb so much salt it will almost be stiff again. At least, I think she can blame it on me. Although sea water is awfully salty even without a prolonged soak.

Dockside again

It feels so limp and tiring when a trip is over. Gross in fact. We blobbed around the boat while it rained buckets outside. Packing up is the pits. Formal checkout took a while and I was surprised to note they didn’t send any divers down to examine our hull. We had to say we hadn’t crunched anything and that was that. Really! Avril threatened to dip up marina water to use to cook her supper but got no support. What if someone forgot to close their toilet valve for pity’s sake!!

Very cool Kevin helped us hook back up to shore power. I really wish you all could see Kevin. He is the only person I know who can make riding an old bike with a basket look dashing. While wearing a long raincoat mind you. That’s a talent not to be sniffed at.

We went to bed early.

Goodbye’s

6:00am found us and our luggage out at the road waiting on the Belize City bus. We had been told it would be passing between 6 and 6:30 and we just needed to wave it down. Seemed a tad slipshod, for sure with our outbound flight scheduled for the afternoon, but when in Belize do as the Belizeans I guess. We waited long enough to get thoroughly eaten by mosquitoes, and then sure enough! A old school-bus came rumbling around the curve with a wooden Belize City sign on the dash and we flagged it down.

Nothing luxurious here, but it had windows that opened and let some cool morning air in. We sometimes had to shut them cause of rain, but I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. I wondered if we would ever get to our destination cause it seemed we screeched to a halt for people every few hundred feet, but eventually that slowed down as we got out of town and into the jungle. We made a 10 minute stop in Belmopan where we parted ways with Rob’s and Caspian, them heading to San Ignacio and us for the airport.

Belize City is crowded. Part of the bus route was on a road cleverly named Cemetery Road. This is because you quite literally drive through the cemetery. Grave stones right on the shoulder. Well, there really isn’t a shoulder. It’s just graves. They hopefully moved the graves that the road actually runs over. Who knows, maybe it was too much work. The bus Terminal was a crowded place surrounded by a market. Lots of foods and spices, crowds of people and cars all threatened by the spitting rain. By this time it was lunch and we bought some papusas from a stand. Heath went to find a taxi to complete our journey to the airport. He told a driver he needed a taxi for 5 adults and the driver asked “how big are they”. Seemed refreshingly logical. Upon viewing our sizes he deemed we’d fit in his ratty dodge caravan, along with another chatty man, and we bounced off to the airport.

I won’t lie, while the heat and jungle have their place, it was fun to feel the cool night air of Chicago. To actually not sweat. To feel my perma frizz hair slowly lay back down. To need regular lotion and not SPF 50.

And so we came home.