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May |
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28 May - Guatemala City
21 May - Weather Update
20 May - Tropical Storm
10 May - After Haul out
28 May - Guatemala City
Since the last update we have actually done quite a lot. We eventually got the boat out of the marina for the day and went up sailing on the lake, it was a really nice day with only a little wind, so was perfect to get a bit of wind in the sails and for me to have a bit of a practice on the boat without things going haywire! There were no crashes or anything although I did get shouted at a bit, but nothing new there! We made a fantastically clean exit from the marina, it was just a shame that there was no one there to witness it! Always the way, if there had have been it all would have gone wrong! The re-entry was pretty smooth as well, again no one there to see it. Click here for pictures
We also spent a night over at Denny's beach for a full moon party, it was more of a full moon party surprise though, the surprise being that you couldn't see the moon at all as it was covered with lots of big clouds and was raining pretty hard, with thunder and lightning! Didn't stop us having a good time though, at least with the rain here it is nice and warm, so it doesn't really matter.
Well we never made it out with 'That' on 28th May as we have just had an interesting time in the city picking up some freight, that Stuart had arranged for his parents to send out for us. This was a very interesting experience and opened up a whole new set of problems! To start with we were on a mission to get the 7am bus stupidly hopping that we may be able to make the trip there and back in the day. (10 hours in a bus, what fun!) In true Guatemalan style the 7.00 bus didn't turn up until 8.30.
We had some contacts in the city to help us get the freight, they speak spanish and know all the airport importing stuff, so that was a real godsend.
We had a bit of a nightmare as when they checked Stuarts passport for the Guatemala stamp, they couldn't find it. We thought they were just being stupid so checked it out ourselves and to our horror noted that when we were stamped in in Livingston, the customs guy had put the wrong date on the stamp, and had dated it 17 March 2004 rather than 19 March 2005, so it looked as though we had been staying in Guatemala illegally for the last year or so!!! Anyway they said, if the stamp was in date then we wouldn't have had to pay any duty on the stuff but seeing as it is very out of date we will have to and they charged us Q812 (£58), and that's on top of all the other paperwork etc we had to pay for. It ended up costing over £100 to get the stupid stuff in.
We ended up staying over night and getting the bus home the next afternoon.
The engine for the dingy was sent in with the freight, the 40 year old seagull engine (click here for pics) that Stuart was so impressed with buying back at home, is not impressing me much or anyone who stands around and watches us try and start it! I miss our borrowed dingy, it zoomed about brilliantly. This one when it does go (which isn't all that often) takes about 2 hours to get 2 meters. Stuart has ended up rowing us more often than not then he gets angry as it doesn't work and then I get into trouble for it as for some strange reason it becomes all my fault. so I am not a great fan on the new engine, in fact I think I could become to loath it. It is all very funny reading the amusing anecdotes that people have written about these engines and how they are temperamental and never work when you want them to and how they cover you in oil and petrol, but it is a different story when it is happening to you. It is not funny in the slightest.
It appears to me that the most worth while thing that was sent in the freight that cost us so much was 2 packets of ginger nuts and some PG Tips, that Stuarts parents had snuck in (a very nice surprise I must say, thank you very much!) The most expensive tea and biscuits we have ever had!
Well after all that palaver, we suffered another blow, Stuart checked the post office a few days back to see if our boat registration documents and the English flag that we ordered have come in yet and the post guy said, yes I did have a package for you but the post office was broken into the other night and it was stolen! Luckily Stuarts dad scanned the papers in before he sent them and emailed them to us. So we will just have to make do with them and keep our fingers crossed that this is ok.
This brings us back to the passport problem. We have since had a friend call up the Eduana in Livingston and explain the problem and he said that it was a honest mistake and that the girl in the office on the day we were there had been using the stamp to date boat papers, then when the customs guy got back to stamp the passports he forgot to change the stamp back to the correct date! Only in Guatemala!
21 May - Weather Update
We heard last night that the hurricane had reached the mountains and dispersed, so all that excitement over this massive storm and we never saw a thing!
20 May - Tropical Storm!
The main talk around the river at the moment is the weather, as a rare tropical storm named Adrian is moving through El Salvador and Guatemala.
Here is a brief bit of info on it that we picked up from NOAA website:
A tropical storm watch is in effect for the entire coast of El Salvador and the pacific coast of Guatemala.
Adrian has been moving toward the northeast near 8 mph...13 km/hr. This general motion is expected to continue on this track. Outer rainbands containing gusty winds and locally heavy rainfall may begin to affect the coastal areas of Guatemala and El Salvador.
Maximum sustained winds are near 50 mph, 85 km/hr with higher gusts. Additional strengthening is forecast during the next 24 Hours. Tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 45 miles 75 km from the center.
Rainfall accumulations of 6 to 10 inches with isolated higher amounts of near 20 inches in the mountains can be expected in association with Adrian. This system also has the potential to produce torrential rainfall over other portions of Central America during the next few days.
Seeing as we are not on the Pacific side of Guatemala we are just expecting heavy rain and stronger winds. The warnings were first given out on 18th May saying that we should expect to see some action in 24-36 hours. It is now 2 days later and we have seen nothing, had a spot of rain yesterday but nothing big. So we are just waiting to see. We have stocked up on some hurricane food supplies and Stuart even brought us chocolate just in case! Can't have us starving (Hmmm, I can't see that happening somehow!)
By the looks of it nothing is going to happen here.
We received the winch through the post a couple of days after we paid the tax on it, which was good, no more problems there. We have had a box of freight sent out to us from home which is now on its way over and it should be arriving here on 24th May. We will then have to go up to Guatemala City to collect it, which I'm sure is not going to be quite as simple or cheap as the winch was.
Stuart has been slowly plodding away with fixing the boat. The frame for the wind generator is now up and he has fixed in and wired up all the instruments: the Depth Sounder, Log and GPS Repeater. We have also attached the sail to the mast, click here to see pictures. We have brought our 3rd and final anchor, a 35lb CQR and with it 50ft of 3/8 chain, which is very heavy and that's what Stuart says so I'm sure I wouldn't even be able to begin to lift it!
I have been doing lots of washing and baking lots of bread, all very exciting stuff!
Apart from that, the plans for getting out of here are still as vague as ever. We have a little sparkle of hope though, we have been invited to follow 'That' the dive boat out to their next expedition to the Sapodilla Cayes. They have a group to take out on 28th May, so we are trying to set this as our target. It will be good to get out even if it is just for a few days. We are still waiting some paperwork to come through for the boat but this is all we need before we can set off.
Then we will have the fun task of checking in at Livingston with the port captain, tax man and customs man, the boat papers are out of date due to the fact that it has been sitting here for 3 years. Despite the assurances when we brought the boat that all the paperwork had been kept up to date so there would be no problems with it! Well we will just have to wait and see what our fine will be when we get there. Once we have done this, we should have no more problems and will be able to come and go to different countries with little fuss.
10 May - After Haul out
Well in the last 10 days we don't seem to have achieved a lot! Stuart has taken out a lot of the windows and resealed the rest, due to a rainy spot a while back, where we realised that the boat was not entirely waterproof!.
Have been waiting for some post to come in for a little while. Went to the post office the other day and found out that we have a package waiting for us in Guatemala City. We have decided that this must be the electric winch that Stuart ordered on Ebay. They feel that we may owe tax on it, so the choice was either to take the 5 hour journey down there to sort it out with them face to face or pay our post guy Q75 (£5.40) to sort it out with them for us. We did this and a week or so later we have come up with a result, we owe the tax people Q470 for the tax (£33). This we have paid and are now awaiting it to turn up!! Fingers crossed that after we have paid all this money it will and we won't have to end up going down to Guatemala city anyway!
We had some help in deciphering all this post office information from one of our friends in the 'Crowbar' (our local) as we didn't really understand what the post guy was saying!! So we dragged someone down who could understand to help us out! We really do need to learn more Spanish. The only thing we know to say at the post office at the mo is: "Hay alguna carta para mi?" (Is there any post for me?) And we are still having problems trying to say that!
It has to be pointed out that when we say post office, its not in anyway similar to the ones back in England. It is run by one guy (probably a touch more cheerful than those back in England, although we are not too sure just how much yet!) and is a small building of about 12ft by 12ft in size. It seems a good idea to not make an enemy of the postman or you will never receive any of your post!! Fingers crossed we haven't done anything wrong so far and try to be as polite and loving to him as possible!!
Stuart has been on a mission to fix the cutlass bearing problem, from our previous episode. Someone has kindly leant him a regulator and pipe so he can use his diving tank, that he brought a while back over here, for him to be able to jump into the water to try and fix. It is best that I leave him to explain this to you all though!:
Stuart explains:
Cutlass bearing problem become a big discussion topic back the pub, there were two threads to this conversation
- Where are you going to get it from and how are you going to fit it.
- Where are you going to fit it, as everyone liked to tell us of the quality of water around Tijax, telling us horror stories of people getting hepatitis or other sicknesses from spending time in the water.
Having moved the boat recently using someone else's dingy we didn't want to abuse their hospitality by doing this again. So the decision was made for me when a stainless steel part I was working on ended up going overboard! We also managed to get 2 cutlass bearings one from the States that come in very quickly and one from a friend. The next step was to fit it under the boat.
I realised as soon as I started working underwater that even using a 2lb club hammer it was going to be more difficult than I had first though. So after looking for my first bit of stainless steel unsuccessfully I retired back into the boat to think of another plan. I needed to be successful in this task, other wise we would have to pay another £350 to get the boat hauled out again, so spent some time drawing out some plans to make a tool that would drive the bearing in. I finally settled on 2 pieces of inch pipe a meter length of 8mm studding. One of the pieces of pipe had 2 half inch tubes welded to either side, the studding was bent into a u shape then fitted to the other end of the inch pipe and secured with 3 jubilee clips and as the shaft was still in the boat, I had to put a 7/8 slit in the pipe that had the two half inch pipes welded to it. This was then fitted underneath the boat and in about an hour I pushed the bearing into place. The propeller was fitted, new anode and the job was done.
The power had been down here for a few nights due to a windy period, our marina seemed to have less power than anywhere else in the Rio Dulce and when everywhere else's power returned we still had none for another day! The internet here also seems so be as sporadic as the power (did we once upon a time say that we were getting the internet on our boat?? Still no joy after 2 months!!) Having no electricity is not too much fun as our only fan works on the shore power, when this is down we have no fan. Boo hoo!! It is far to hot at night to have no fan. Luckily Stuart is a bit of a genius when it comes to fixing situations that we don't like and sorted out a couple of 12V fans that run from the battery so that kept us fairly cool for the time the power was off (very noisy but cool).
In the time that Stuart was doing the cutlass bearing we encountered the dive boat 'That' a 62ft trimaran that has resided on the river for the last year. Run by a really lovely young Dutch couple. We went to get a fill off of them for Stuart's dive tank, and bumped into them later on in 'La Launcher' (local restaurant / bar.) We got talking to them and a couple of their friends who invited us all over to dinner. We had a really nice dinner over the other side of the river (if not a pretty drunken night!) It was really nice to meet some new people.
From there we were invited to a bash the next day on the boat 'That' for Babet's birthday (one of the partners who runs the dive boat). So after Stu heroically fixed the cutlass bearing in the morning, we thought we deserved to go to the party in the afternoon! Had a really good time there drinking, chatting and listening to one of the guys on the river playing saxophone (click here for pics). Turns out the the dive guys are looking out to revamp their website, so I am on a mission to help them out. So if anyone is interested on going on a diving come boat mission in Guatemala or to the Sapodilla Cayes.