Roatan

Thursday, June 4th, 2009. When we first arrived at Roatan…we sailed down to and entered French Harbor. This island is 2 miles wide and 35 miles long, so while Guanaja is not that far away from the tip of Roatan…where we wanted to go (French Harbor) was 35 miles! We were able to sail for about half of that…then motor sail. We arrived in good light to miss the shallow reefs and then view the deeper ones as we went over them (VERY clear water here)!! We were trying to make a decision as to where we would have the boat when Matt arrived on Saturday. A couple we had met in Guanaja had recommended West End…on the northwest side of the island (around the bottom tip of the island and up a few miles). We picked up a Roatan Marine Park buoy (marked RMP) behind the reef and Big and Little French Cay…but after noticing two other boats had a buoy AND had dropped their anchor…we decided to do the same. Hugo off the deck and in the water…we went into town motoring up to another ketch first to stop and get what information we could. Before we left for town, Lee was invited to happy hour aboard the Lady H. As we passed these homes…Paul mentioned that this was not at all what he was expecting when he thought of Roatan…we walked along a paved road for a couple of blocks, THEN we got to the grocery store! The BEST store we had gone to…practically since the U.S.!!! Wow, unbelievable selection and "normal" stuff!!Friday morning we motored the Lady H over to West End through the narrow opening in the reef (marked by buoys thank heaven – or the RMP) and picked up another RMP mooring in front of another Amel. Only four other boats! We went in to town to check it out…swung by the Amel first…got to chatting…and were invited to happy hour aboard their boat! Once into town we were both relieved…VERY cute area of small shops (many dive shops) and different kinds of restaurants…only small grocery stores…but we could make due! We went by the Roatan Marine Park office, donated, got our wrist bands AND a wonderful book of the dive sites! We went in to West End Divers, chatted with them, and decided that they were to fill our tanks for the duration! I was a little on edge…having my first student (Matt) and not ever have been diving in this area!! Saturday Paul went to the airport and I stopped by another dive shop that was an IDC (Instructor Development Center). I asked where was the best spot for Confined Water instruction…they believed Half Moon Bay…and so it began! To make Sunday through Wednesday shorter…Matt was a great student…he was certified PADI Open Water Scuba Diver on Wednesday!On his Open Water Dive #3 we went out to a wall and looked over…I could see he was pleased! Thursday, Paul, Matt and I went on a dive! Finally I could go diving and take my camera and think about taking pictures…not my student!Flash decided to act up…darn!But look really closely at this Peacock Flounders mouth...He/she was having LUNCH!!! Friday morning we went on one additional dive…Lighthouse Reef…and ALL three of us truly enjoyed this dive! Matt had my Canon camera…I had my Olympus…AND my flash worked... so of course pictures that I like! We spotted turtles…and of course as we were doing our safety stop over the reef (15-20 feet of water), Matt and his dad hunted lobster! No lobster dinner however as it is not lobster season here yet…but oh, how much fun they had together hunting for them!! So, thank you again Matt for being my first student…for taking the leap of faith…trusting me (and your equipment) under the water! I hope you will continue to relax and enjoy for many years! And, for now... goodbye Roatan…we are off to Utilla!

Cruise Date June 3rd...

Cruise Date June 3 4:35 PM Guanaja Bay Islands Honduras
As we wind down this years cruise I thought we might look back and review this years casualty report on what breakdowns we had and how we might have prevented them. I will try to do these in order. We are about 2 ½ weeks from crossing the Bar on the Rio and checking into Mario’s Marina for hurricane season. We have been covering a lot of water over the last 7 months, visited a lot of beautiful places…a few ugly ones too. We have met and made many new friends along the way. We look forward to meeting up with them again at some other anchorage.
The Lady H will be 6 yrs old in September. Over the last 6 yrs she has sailed and motored almost 30,000 miles. Some items are at the end of their useful life are in need of replacement. Others are junk and need to be pitched over the side.
Starting last year our Icom SSB has had some problems. It just shut down when I transmitted. We send the power supply back…$90 later they could not find a problem. Joyce was flying home to Seattle before Christmas, so her luggage included a complete 802 SSB and power supply. They had this for 3 weeks testing 24/7 and could not find a fault. The unit was air freighted to us in the USVI, by Icom at no charge. This is a company with real customer service and we as cruisers should support them by buying their products. Sorry Raymarine …cannot say that about your products.. they are the junk that need to go over the side.
On our passage south we had the transmission cooler fail mixing the transmission fluid with seawater. Would have been nice if the cooler had a zinc which might have prevented the electrolysis that caused the failure. Luckily with Denny’s help we were able to fix this before there was damage to the transmission. Stinky our 8 hp Mercury outboard had to see the outboard doctor…$350 ouch…maybe if Stinky had not had 2 saltwater baths in the last year, that could have been prevented. A few years back I replaced my fresh water pump with a new design pump. I have replaced 4 of these under warranty in the last 2 yrs. Kind of hard to go out and spend 300 bucks on a new one when they keep sending me new ones for free…but that is the solution. We had a bowthruster failure at a critical time…luckily no damage to the boat, just my pride. Seems a seal had failed allowing saltwater into the gearbox. Will be checking more carefully when we haul the boat each year.
Batteries have been a subject of many a blog on this boat. Back in January, we replaced all 12 of the house batteries for the 5th time in 6 years. 2 problems here, the quality of the battery and how they are charged. The Lady H came with 13 group 27 deep cycle marine batteries. These failed 11 months later to be replaced under warranty. Replaced again 18 months later at my cost, followed every 10 or 11 months under warranty. An Amel, an electric boat has 640 AH at 24 volts….lots of battery power. But they have no way to equalize the batteries as they age. Last year I installed a new inverter/charger that has an equalization cycle. By spending a night in a marina, plugged in we can recover almost 1/3-1/2 of the capacity by equalizing. Amel, listen up…you need to provide a method to equalize the batteries on your boats.
Soon after we left Amel in Gaudelupe, the electric outhaul motor quit. I was able to remove and clean, but the motor needs new brushes…as does the main and jenny furling motors. This is a wear item…it’s time .. a job while up the Rio.
The water maker has been working making great water since we replaced the membranes back in Annapolis. The system has 785 hours and has made almost 28,000 gallons of water. There are 2 pumps, a high pressure which had service 3-4 yrs ago and a low pressure feed pump that pumps seawater through the pre-filters. Well this is a 220 volt 50 hz motor…almost impossible to find down here in the islands unless you want to pay 3x the price from Amel. Since we are not using the A/C, I plumbed and wired the A/C pump to be the feeder pump. Matt my Marine son is flying down this weekend, loaded down with 3 pumps and lots of other goodies. I will install a new feeder pump and replace the existing A/C pump using the old as a spare. He also has one of the warranted water pumps as another spare. We do expect hard usage on the A/C so I thought we would start with a new pump.
On our sail to Bonaire, the ballooner “hook “ as it is called broke, allowing the sail to come down the forestay into the water while sailing at 7-8 knots. These are plastic, I ordered 2 new so I would have a spare. Amel informed me they only had 1 at $90, but could supply us one of the new style of some other material for 325 Euros. I ordered the plastic and will get one machined of aluminum for ½ that.
Raymarine is a sore subject on the Lady. I have replaced almost every component, some 2 and 3 times. Junk…on my %^%#@# list. The VHF radio has what is called a command mic. You control the entire radio form the mic. 4 yrs ago had to replace this mic because the LED could not be read. The hand set is in the companionway and is pulled out for use in the cockpit. Well the curly cord is cracking causing the radio to shut down. I inquired about a replacement cable….. oh no you have to buy the handset for $275. Screw them…will buy a new Icom.
We were getting ready to leave Guanaja on Tuesday, I had started the generator to charge the batteries and make some water. 5 minutes into the charge and the engine quits, the indicator light indicating the need for service. I thought back to when I had last replaced the water pump impeller, yep…7 months ago. The damn things break apart every 6-8 months. I change the engine yearly and have never had to change one because of failure. The genset fails before the yearly replacement. I pulled off the pump…getting pretty good at it. I replace the impeller with our last spare and reinstalled the pump. I started the engine and Joyce indicated no water flow. Damn, now time to remove the heat exchanger and fish out the broken impeller blades. Back together and try again…no water flow. Double damn. Removed the pump again…yep blades gone. I use my impeller removal tool, no go..seems the key way on the shaft has spun inside the impeller. Looking more like replacing the pump than just an impeller. Where in the hell am I going to get that down here before Matt arrives. Now here is the situation, we have no replacement impeller or pump, my son arrives Saturday, we have less then 1/3 tank of water, laundry needs to be done and the batteries need a good charge. Well we can charge the batteries with the main engine, but the water and laundry were a problem. Yes we could go in and get water and do the laundry ashore….there had to be a better way. I sat below in the engine room. I had hoses going everywhere, most not to the designated pump. I spied our 24 volt anchor wash pump. Since we were not using the windlass, why not plumb it into the heat exchanger of the genset. I move some hoses around and fired up the genset. 5 min later and the unit shut down, overheated. Damn, went below to find the pumps breaker had tripped. Double damn again. Then I remembered that all the salt water pumps had a screwdriver slot at the back of the pump. This allows you to rotate the pump manually to break up any marine growth. A few turns and off it went. We made 400 liters of water, charged the batteries and did a load of laundry.
Last and probably the most important and expensive is the windlass. We live on the hook. Total marina time in the last 7 months 5-6 days…remember equalization. The rest of the time we are at anchor. I’m an anchor guy…best anchor, best chain…and you need a way to get all that back on the boat. Lofrans Tigress is a great windlass. Have had no problems except for the up/down switches Amel installed. These switches fail after about 12-16 months. Have had 1 instance where the switch shorted letting all 225 feet of chain out…remember always have the bitter end secured (end of the anchor rode)
Well in the Aves, we returned to the boat, I commented to Joyce that the chain snubber was off. Upon inspection the windlass had decided to wind up the chain only to be stopped when the snubber jammed the windlass. No snubber and the windlass would have hauled up the anchor and the boat floating away. All seemed to work then. In Bonaire one cannot anchor so the next time we used the windlass was in Curacao. Not happy with the first set...the 2st set was in the channel so I picked up and the windlass jammed and tripped the breaker with the anchor hanging just above the surface. Joyce circled while I launched the 2nd anchor on 50 ft of chain and 250 of rode. Long story short, no 24 v motors in the Caribbean, no 24 v windlass’s in the Caribbean. We have devised a system to save Joyce’s back to retrieve the anchor till we get up the Rio.
So here we are in Rotan, A/C pump feeding the watermaker, the anchor wash pump cooling the heat exchanger of the genset, our anchor puller upper using the powered winch is retriving the anchor, the mainsail has a seam rip,the bottom need a good cleaning and new paint. The list of to do's is into the 3rd page.The whole boat needs a bath as it has not rained for 3 weeks. And the 7 day passage from Curasao has left us exhausted and in need of a few weeks of downtime. I'm finishing up this blog a few days later and Matt arrives tomorrow (June 6th) around noon, so no rest till next weekend.

Guanaja...

Saturday, May 30th, 2009. Going east to west, Guanaja (pronounced wah – nah – ha) is the first island of The Bay Islands, Honduras. We have heard that many people pass this island by because of the notoriety of Roatan. We had spoken to a couple (Frank and Pat on Forewinds) who had spent a year and a half in this area and they loved it! Of course this was before Mitch in 1998…Mitch was especially hard on these islands. There is also the opportunity for Paul to pee on a pig (longer story and if it happens there WILL be pictures)…so we thought it was worth a day or two stop-over! In through the narrow…but deep channel…by Half-Moon Cay, making our way through the reefs…we headed back up the island inside the reefs to Savanah Bight. Very cute waterside community! We anchored…the spare anchor still…just on the other side of a reef outside of town. I was at the helm and Paul literally “dropped the hook”! We were the only sailboat here! Paul wanted to finish clean up on the forward head…so we decided to go into town after that was done. We rested for a few minutes in the cockpit after clean-up. We watched from the boat as they off-loaded a small truck (looked used) from an island transport boat…most people seem to walk, ride bikes, or boat around…the number of motorized vehicles of any kind could be tallied on one hand. It was a BIG day for someone in this town…a new truck!! We watched as the products were taken off the transport by hand and then by wheelbarrow to the local store by young men. Then we went ashore. And VERY cute community indeed AND friendly! They are the ancestors of the native Payan and Mayan Indians (almost made extinct by the Spanish taking them for slaves), English, Dutch and French pirates, and some South African slaves from St Vincent in the 1800’s and some from Jamaica. That is what the books say…what I saw was a very large Spanish influence. Spanish is spoken mainly here…but it seems -again according to the books - English is the main language…perhaps they are generalizing all of The Bay Islands…and this little one is “different”…I will know more as time goes on. Some of the boats here are very different…long and narrow – canoe like…some are like the Colombian boats (I only know what a Colombian boat looks like because when the Bonaire Customs guys came out to give us the shotgun back and I told them I really liked their boat…they said it was a Colombian boat and they had confiscated it from drug runners). We had heard from another couple via SSB (SV Charlotte) that there had been an earthquake in this area a few days ago… they were sailing by Utila on their way to Livingston when they felt their boat shaking!!! Anyway, the store owner was telling us about what happened at his little store when the earthquake hit! He also told us of how great this island is…there is wonderful fresh water in the hills…and he mentioned he could find someone to take us on a tour if we wanted. Unfortunately, our goal here is to check in, talk with other cruisers/divers in the area, perhaps find dive sites and get to Roatan…BUT…if we are able to come back here with Matt…or next fall…I’m hoping we will take the time for a tour!! We only had u.s.d. but they happily exchanged their Honduras Lempiras (going exchange rate around $18 Lemps to $1 u.s.d.). We bought some bread – I gave her $2.00 u.s.d. and she gave me $9.00 Lempiras change – so my math says the bread cost $1.50 u.s.d….not sure what bread goes for in the states right now…but I thought in an island off of Honduras that was a pretty good price!!! We were not able to get ice for drinking in this small little town…but I had saved enough ice on the 7 day passage for Paul to have TWO tall G&T’s when we got back to the boat to relax! I do believe we are finally “cruising”. Now don’t get me wrong…I have enjoyed all the islands we have visited for the last almost 2 years…but it seems…starting slowly at Isla Blanquilla…as we have progressed west…and now here in Guanaja…we have gotten truly to be “cruisers” (almost “newbie’s” by these cruisers standards). Sunday morning we lifted anchor (Armstrong and Ingenuity) and left the cute settlement of Savanah Bight. We didn’t have to motor very far…maybe ten minutes. On the chart plotter the Cay is called Josh’s…everyone around here calls it Graham’s Cay…Graham owns the small restaurant and resort. We dropped anchor between a sloop and catamaran…the only other two boats here. We made water and washed a load of clothes. Lunch was to be at Graham’s…but on the way in we stopped to glean some information from a Swiss boat we had anchored next to. Next thing we knew we were aboard and chatting away. Very nice couple…Elaine and Lawrence (they pronounce their names correctly of course…I could not repeat it so the above are the closest in English that comes to them)…on their 38 foot sloop, Linus…they have been cruising 12 years…across the pond from The Canaries…and for the last five years they have stayed here…well…here being…up the Rio Dulce for Hurricane season and The Bay Islands and Honduras Bay Islands for the rest of the season. They are now buying a piece of property near The Bight, Guanaja and will perhaps be selling their boat. She may also want to be my scuba “student”…but our schedules for the next two weeks won’t give us the time! They were so wonderfully helpful in their information and we promised to exchange emails. We were greeted as we entered the open air restaurant by Graham…sat down and started talking with him about the area…well, Paul did…I excused myself and took some pictures of his birds…and of the Cay… By the time I had gotten back two other couples had arrived (one from the catamaran and one that had brought their dingy over from the anchorage near Bonacca Cay). The couple on the cat are waiting for a weather window to go to Panama…they were up the Rio last year…the other couple (on a CSY walkover) are heading for the Rio again this year as well! Another WEALTH of information about The Bay Islands and about the Rio as well! After lunch I excused myself again, walked around the Cay and took some additional pictures. Found the dove pen… Apparently the cost of this paradise is the no-see-um’s…and we all were getting our share…so not too long after I got back we requested a bag of ice…to be on our way back to the boat. Oh, and here I guess I need to mention…our lunch for two…I had chicken fingers, fries and a diet coke, Paul had a cheeseburger, fries, and five beers…with a bag of ice thrown in…cost $23.00 u.s.d…granted this is a “resort” so it probably was more expensive than most other places…but we thought it was a great value! Our day was truly enjoyable. Once back to the boat, as I was taking the laundry down this blew right next to the boat and scared the living daylights out of me!! So I watched him/her…and it just kept circling around slowly and letting me take pictures. All of the other cruisers were headed back to The Bight for the night (including Linus) as they mentioned it was to blow 25 plus knots…AND IT DID!!! Here we are with the smaller anchor down, only 50 feet of chain, the rest line…and Graham’s Cay is all that is between us and the weather! I remember Joanna from Delphinus stating that she had stood “anchor watch” one night…well, that is how I felt…so J…I stood my anchor watch!! Thankfully, we didn’t move! We hoisted anchor Monday morning and moved through the reefs over to The Bight…a little more protected anchorage…more importantly closer to Bonaaca Cay where we wanted to check in. To our amazement, as we were anchoring…our friend stopped by again…we are convinced that he/she has retired here behind the reefs of Guanaja. Anyway, it was still a long dingy ride to Bonaaca Cay…two miles or so?? This Cay is as densely populated as Hong Kong (according to some stuff we read)…check in was a breeze…all in one building…nice young men…wonderful…we were accompanied by Charlie, a local hustler, who was very nice and informative, but whom, when we are here again…we will say “no thanks”… he thought he should have a bigger “tip”! We finally got some internet…slow but sure (amazing to think it is even here)…went to the bank…the local grocery store…and of course I took off for a few minutes to get some pictures of the town. We are in a hurry this time…off to Roatan Thursday morning. We both are hoping, taking about, perhaps starting to plan… to return here. Oh, and do notice there are no pictures of pigs…it is not for want of trying…Paul has asked numerous times about the place that we were told of…we are thinking they left with Mitch…

And my note…thank you to all who have expressed their appreciation of my photography! I really do so enjoy taking the pictures and sharing them with you. These last few blogs I feel I must apologize…let me explain. Because I downsize the pictures for easier uploading, I also sharpen them so you are able to see more of what I can see in the original picture. With my computer down…I have been using Paul’s computer and software…well now his software is “glitching” on the sharpen effect! So with these last few blogs my choices were either no blog at all until the software glitch was fixed…no pictures with blog…or pictures that I feel are not as good as I would like to post…and, of course it is the later.