It's the journey...

We loved Puerto Escondido.  It is one of the very few places in the world where you can be totally alone.  Puerto Escondido is a national park, and therefore has some maintained hiking trails. 

For months we had wanted to hike through the jungle, but since we didn't have a machete (yet...stay tuned) there was no way to get through.  Here though, the hiking paths made it possible. 

We hiked three of the trails.  One trail went through the jungle and up a smallish hillside leading to a nice vista.  A second trail went from a beach up a different, much larger, hillside.  On this trail there were stairs built all the way up the hillside. At times, I counted stairs, and I would get around 200 and be too exhausted to be able to count any higher.  Then, I'd catch my breath and count up to 200 or so before I lost count again.  I am not exaggerating to say that there were at least 1000 stairs.  The next several days, my legs remembered every single one.

Our favorite trail led from our side of the land, through the jungle, over to a beautiful, isolated beach.  This trail was physically easy, but it required some preparation.  Namely, a good coating of bug spray.  Walking through the jungle, but never stopping because the mesquites would catch you, we heard howler monkeys and swarms of bugs; saw crabs and ants and little lizards; smelled exotic flowers and were surrounded by every kind of jungle plant.

The other side of the trail was a little piece of paradise: miles of deserted white sand beach, seclusion, blue gentle waves and fish jumping around the swimmers (us) from time to time.

Alone in our isolation, we lingered in Escondido for a few days, waiting for our friends on board Sea U Manana.  They never showed, so we figured they must have skipped Escondido and gone straight to the Rio Dulce.  So, we left our little jungle paradise and headed on to the Rio.  

Crazy Anchorage #1

Our next stop was just four hours away- Puerto Cortes, Honduras.  Puerto Cortes is a large commercial port with lots of huge cargo ships and stinky air.  The plus is that the port is in a U shape and provides excellent coverage from North, East and South winds.  We pulled up right to the sea wall at the top of the U and anchored where we thought we would be well protected from the trade winds.  We stayed on board for the night- my adventure spirit had grown a little tired.

Our first several hours anchored at the head of the bay were peaceful.  Then, at midnight, the wind shifted 180 degrees to howl from the West.  With the wind speed picked up to 23 knots and no protection between us and the air, the waves started building.  Soon, our boat was slamming in the four to five foot waves, and we were still at anchor.

Mark and I went out in the cockpit and stared at our situation for about an hour before deciding to pull up the anchor and move the boat.  Normally, moving your boat in the middle of the night, especially in a rain down pour, is not a good idea, especially when you are not familiar with the bay you are in, and there is a sunken boat sticking halfway out of the water in the middle of the bay.  We observed that the waves were coming straight in the bay, building up as they came toward us, and then bouncing off the sea wall and hitting us in the stern again.  The fact that we were in the back of the bay started out as a well-sheltered area, but turned into the worst possible place, once the winds changed.  If we dragged at all, we were in danger of hitting the wall, but our main concern was the damage that the power of the waves could inflict.

With the help of our radar, and an attempt to contact the port authority via radio, we moved the boat at 1:00 in the morning, or as our friends Mic ad Barb say, "O' Dark 30".  Having found a small "nook" in the land we anchored and the water calmed down significantly so we were able to get a few hours' sleep... until the wind shifted back again at 6 a.m.  At that point the wind and waves were on us again, so we just pulled up the anchor and left.

It turned out to be a good thing that we left so early.  Outside of Cortes, there is some strange water.  We were stuck in a two knot opposing current from Cortes to Livingston, so rather than the 6.5 knot cruising speed we had become accustomed to, we did 4 knots most of the way significantly increasing the time our trip would take.

We arrived within sight of the Rio Dulce at 5 pm.  We soon heard a familiar voice on the VHF hailing "any boat on the Rio Dule".  Sea U Manana, whom we had spent the month with in Roatan, and whom we'd been waiting for in Escondido, was right behind us!  We were happy to see them and happy to find out that they were safe.

Crossing the bar at Livingston into Rio Dulce is no easy feat.  It is a very shallow crossing.  High tide was at 7:20 pm- after dark- and it was now about 5:30 pm.  Sea U Manana, a catamaran with a much shallower draught, was able to cross in the daylight.  We, drawing 6.5 feet, decided to wait until daylight for the next high tide.

Crazy Anchorage #2

Since we couldn't cross the bar, we opted to head 10 miles down shore to Puerto Barrios - Guatemala for the night, instead of anchoring out again in totally unprotected waters.  Luckily, since we got there in the dark, Puerto Barrios another large banana export port, has a well-lit channel to enter by.  Mark had been tracking a building storm on the radar for a couple of hours and it was a race as to who would get to Puerto Barrios first - us or the storm.

Just as we were getting ready to anchor, the lightning that we had been seeing in the distance surrounded us.  Visibility went from 1 mile to 50 feet, our boat is 46 feet long.  Mark decided to seek shelter behind a commercial pier used for the banana boats.  We danced for an hour with an industrial tug boat which was having trouble staying put in the building wind and seas.  Each vessel had all their lights on and still neither was able to see the other, other than with radar.

I was on the bow getting drenched.  The 40 knot gusting wind was blowing the rain so hard it hurt as it hit my body.  It was blowing so hard I could not hear anything Mark was trying to tell me 25 feet away in the cockpit, even when we were communicating on the VHF radios.

I was able to go back inside the boat, after an hour of setting and then resetting and the resetting the anchor again and again. My nerves settled down a little bit.  I did not like all the bolt lightning which was strikingl around us.  But the lightning settled down and eventually so did I.

The next morning we traded our spot on the pier with a 300 foot Dole pineapple container ship,  and lifted anchor in the dark so that we could arrive in time for the 6 am high tide on the Rio Dulce.  Two hours later we would finally cross into the Rio Dulce with 5 inches to spare under the keel.