I don’t want anyone to think that our sailing adventures each year are anything but idyllic cruises through tropical waters, paradise on the seas. On the other hand we have had some periodic setbacks on what is now a seven year trip from San Diego through Central America to Panama, the canal transit, and then an adventurous sail north through the Columbian islands, Honduras, Belize and Guatemala. It’s been a great trip, however I will admit that right now we are in the middle of one of those “setbacks”. This is not the cruise from hell because so far we haven’t been able to cruise anywhere… yet.
The trip started benignly enough with a red-eye into Guatemala the first week in December. If you look back in the blog you will find that I “swore” we would never do another red-eye to anywhere, but we forgot. We were dead tired when we reached Guatemala City and still had a long bus ride ahead of us. We were sitting in the bus station waiting for the overland portion of the trip, when a guy walks through the city bus terminal with his three goats. We thought it was good fortune smiling on us when we realized he was not looking for our bus, but five hours and a short boat ride later we were back aboard Mañana to discover what happens when good fortune is not smiling.
Over the summer we had sprung a small leak in one of the hatches over our berth. In this country a small leak means a lot of water (it rains about 350 inches per year). Some time during the 200 inches of rain they had from June to November we had accumulated about 30 gallons of water in the port hull of our catamaran. The damage was stupefying. The water had first accumulated on our bunk destroying the mattress, and then it soaked into the woodwork at both ends of the bed and into the side wall liner and the overhead. I won’t even mention the condition of the floor. It was total destruction, wood rot, black mold, mildew. Water also seeped into the cabinets under the bed and rotted all of the clothing and linens stored there. Finally, it appears that a repetitive process of evaporation during warm spells and condensation during cool spells had spread water vapor throughout the hull that eventually buckled all of the wood veneer and destroyed any cushions that had not been under the leak itself. We were floored. The hull was uninhabitable and would require a lot of repair work.
But it’s a boat. It happens. The repair process got off to a good start, and we are fortunate to be in a place where labor is cheap and workmanship is good. Cushions have already been made to replace those in the port hull as well as the cockpit/salon cushions that had also been stored in that hull. As a bonus we are replacing all of the cushions in the starboard hull so that they will match, and from that point of view the boat will be better than ever. But no wood veneer is available in Guatemala so after a week long drying out process we opted to fiberglass the interior of the port hull rather than replace the wood. We got a good price, promises of fast work, and started tearing out the old, in with the new, and away we go! Fixed in no time at all…
But this is Christmas week (ho-ho-ho) so while we thought we would be sailing by the first week of January we had not counted on the 5 days off in each week for both Christmas and New Year’s. My workers put in 2 days in the past 12. So far all of the work seems to have involved fiberglass, in particular fiberglass grinding and fiberglass resins. There is dust everywhere (try to expand your concept of “everywhere” when considering this) and enough intoxicating resin fumes to hold a psychedelic party. The woodwork repairs to the cabinets will come next. In the meantime we are trying to live completely in one hull along with all of our gear, new cushions, clothes bins, anchors, etc. Crowded is the word that comes to mind. Since work is now scheduled to run to “at least” January 15 my first mate has abandoned ship, though I can hardly blame her, and I am a solo sailor…so to speak. Andrea was scheduled to fly home for four days in late January to get some accounting work done for the farm so she went early, plans to stay late, and will let the captain deal with the mess by himself for the two weeks. Still the repairs went well if a bit slowly.
I watched the work, polished the boat, read, socialized, had lunches on the river and dinners at the marina, and generally did nothing each day in a very tropical setting. There are worse ways to spend the time. Howler monkeys great me each morning, last night we had an large anteater in a tree right outside the bar, and our resident heron spent the day wrestling with a small snake. The snake was clever enough to wrap itself around the heron’s beak every time the big bird tried to swallow it, and the entertainment lasted for quite a while. The boat is stern to the wide river and each evening the fishermen set their nets across the river starting just behind the boat and then collect them again in the early AM. Morning coffee has me watching other boats move along the river headed out to Honduras and Belize and points further along. It’s a good life, but I’d rather be sailing.
