Clark April 12th, 2008
The Condesa website is having technical difficulties at the moment, but the engineering team is hard at work. Condesa is safely in Mexico, and many fascinating stories and dazzling photos are forthcoming.
Clark March 22nd, 2008
Still can’t upload any photos, and I’ve got some good ones.
Life is sweet here at the Marina Puesta del Sol, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. To get to a place where I could do any provisioning this morning, I took the bus two hours to Chinandengo, the Big Smoke. I got on the bus at 7AM and we began winding our way through the farmlands and shantytowns of northern Nicaragua in a cloud of dust. By the time we got to Chinandengo it was standing room only, several of the babies had messed their diapers, and the chickens were starting to squawk.
The bus was an old American school bus, the kind we’ve all ridden. It was manufactured by the Blue Bird Body Co. in Fort Valley, Georgia, and the bus had ‘Hampshire County Schools’ stenciled on the side, which I now see is in Massachusetts.
During my two-hour bus ride I started wondering, how do these retired school busses get from the US to Nicaragua? Perhaps there is this crack team of Nicaraguan drivers who fly to the US with a credit card and a big bag of the highest quality…dark roast Nicaraguan coffee. They explode out of the district depot in Massachusetts, blaze through New England, cross the prairie, tear through the cornfields of Kansas and the Texas badlands, crossing the border at Juaraz and paying whatever bribes they have to. They don’t even stop the bus to change drivers: one just slides under the other and takes over. Meanwhile the off duty shift has made a camp among the seats where they brew strong pots of coffee and cook Nicaraguan comfort food on a portable stove. They sail through the Chihuahuan desert, fly through the perifericos of Mexico City under cover of darkness, wind their way through the jungles of Oaxaca and Chiapas, then cross the Guatemala border, all the while the 35-year-old diesel keeps revving without complaint. They go past Lago Atitlan, through Guatemala City on the Panamericana, cut the corner through Honduras, and into the home stretch into the bus’s new home in Nicaragua…all in 112 hours.
I got to asking around and it’s nothing so romantic. They ship the busses on a barge from one of the gulf states to Puerto Cortez, on the Atlantic side. Then they bring them to Managua, where there’s sort of a school bus used car lot.
Clark March 20th, 2008
Nicaragua has been great, surf-wise, but it’s time to cover some miles. I said goodbye to Nick. Nick has a 4WD and I have a boat, and together we covered the surf spots of southern Nicaragua like nobody else on the coast, and all during a 4-6 foot swell.
I started to cover the miles and noticed I wasn’t making normal progress. The bottom paint is shot after about 8000 miles, some of it through ice, and the hull was a living reef…and it had only been ten days since the last scraping in Tamarindo. These are fertile waters along the coast, and the growth comes fast.
I ducked into a bight in the coast yesterday morning, donned my snorkeling gear, and jumped in, scraper in hand. I did the propeller first, as I always do, and felt pronounced stinging all over my body. Often there are some stingers in the water, especially surfing, and I just deal with it. I’m usually more concerned with the biting things.
I went on with the scraping of the whole bottom of Condesa, about a two-hour job, and I was getting stung like hell. But the job had to be done and the pain was tolerable as long as I kept my mind on the task at hand. I’d only stop when I could see a tentacle wrapped my face to pull it off. They might have been stray Portuguese man-o-war tentacles as there are a lot of those around. Whatever they were, they contained the projectile nematocysts that these stinging invertebrates use for defense or killing food. (I learned this after reading the Merck Manual and Dr. David Eastman’s First Aid Afloat later on.)
I toughed it out until the end and then got the hell out of the water and tore all the gear off. The minute I hit the air the stinging got much worse. The salt water had somewhat of a cooling effect on the stings and once I was out the pain was pronounced. I ran for the deck shower to wash it all off…a very bad idea.
As it turns out, according to the Merck Manual and First Aid Afloat, fresh water will cause the nematocysts to fire and only salt water should be used for removing the stingers. Silly me, I thought the sea water would just have more stingers in it.
Shower of fire! Fire! The pain was debilitating, especially on my face. It was like the razor burn of all razor burns. I started feeling woozy and puked over the side. I knew where this might be going and dived for the medical kit, which contains an Epi-Pen. If I started having trouble breathing I’d Pulp Fiction myself.
I remembered that alcohol was good for such stings, and I doused myself with a bottle of rubbing alcohol. This brought some immediate relief, enough to get into the books and see what the hell to do. The alcohol was the right thing, as would be vinegar, baking soda, or basically anything to change the PH of the skin. After that it was hot water compresses, and then they said to cover my body with a baking soda paste, then scrape it off with a dull knife. I didn’t have that much baking soda, so I forwent the knife-scraping. The hot water seemed to neutralize the poison, at least to where I didn’t feel sick anymore.
I should have done the scraping. I took another fresh water shower that night and it was shower of fire all over again. I guess the nematocysts attach and wait for their trigger, and in those that haven’t yet fired the poison stays intact, even after the hot water and alcohol.
The books predicted I would have oozing pustules all over my body, and they were right. Today I have nasty little blisters everywhere, or oozing pustules if you prefer, but thankfully my face was spared, which is odd since that’s what hurt worst. Oozing pustules are so in for Easter.
So now I’m in Marina Puesta El Sol, in Northern Nicaragua, which will be my last stop in this fine country. Haven’t decided if I’ll charge all the way to Mexico, or stop in El Salvador.
Hmm, this Nicaraguan Internet cafe doesn’t seem to want to let me upload photos…next time.
Clark March 11th, 2008
Yellowfin tuna fever, that is! (Matt is the only person who will laugh at this joke.)
Condesa cleared into Nicaragua yesterday, after a long birthday weekend of living the life. Larry and I cleared out of Playa El Coco, Costa Rica, on Friday, and what a time we’ve had since then. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday…surfing like madmen, catching fish, drinking beer and rum, and with the Papagayos continuing to howl offshore at thirty knots, the sailing has been spirited too.
We began our little adventure by making a beeline from El Coco to Ollie’s Point, one of the most famous surf spots in Costa Rica. A few tourists came in a panga in the monning, but left just when it started to get good. Larry and I had it all to ourselves for all of my birthday. We surfed until we were exhausted, dehydrated, and sunburned, which was surprising since we spent most of the day in the shade of the barrels. As surfing goes, it was fabulous.
We raised anchor, hoisted a scrap of jib, and let the Papagajos blow us west to the Islas Murcielagos, where we spent a night. Just after our morning snorkeling expedition, a park ranger came in a boat to inform us that we were in a national park and it would be $15 per person per day, so $60 payable at the park office. Since we already had our exit papers from Costa Rica, and didn’t have any cash anyway, we pulled anchor and politely said ‘ba-bye.’ I figure this is fair enough when I just didn’t know. The ranger didn’t seem offended.
We spent a long day pinching against the Papagayos. Larry landed the 15 pound yellowfin tuna, pictured above, while I manhandled the boat in the blustery winds. This is the first proper fish I’ve caught since the Atlantic. We’ve been eating it for days: sashimi, grilled steaks, carpacio, and seared ahi…
Since we couldn’t make San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, by nightfall. We ended up blown about ten miles to the northwest, where we anchored in a likely cove with some promising waves. The next morning, this is what greeted us:
It’s always a little dicey, and exhilerating, surfing an unknown break for the first time, but when it’s breaking six feet…wow.
It is surely a known break – it’s too good not to be – but we still don’t know if it has a name. This can also serve as a lesson in anchoring your boat too close to breaking waves. As the tide went out they started breaking within a few boatlengths…oops. Again we surfed perfect, hollow waves all morning until the tide got really low and some rocks started sticking up.
Surfing is a fabuous sport when you’ve got some of the best breaks in the world all to yourselves. It sucks when you’re out at Zooport with 300 guys wanting to get in fistfights.
Checking into San Juan del Sur was quick and easy. The national policeman was conducting his search of Condesa when Larry jumped and said, ‘Señor! Señor! Tienes un escorpion on your leg!’ I jumped two feet, tripped on a bucket, and fell on my ass. There was indeed about a six inch scorpion on the guy’s leg, just above the top of his jackboot. He reached down casually, said, ‘He’s my pet,’ showed us that the scorpion’s stinger had been nipped off, slipped him back into his shirt pocket, and buttoned him in.
Larry just hopped a cab for the border, and I’m once again alone in some foreign port, another year older and probably not any wiser.
Clark March 3rd, 2008
Tamarindo has been having its swell of the year. Eight to ten foot surf has been pounding the Costa Rican coast for four days. We’ve also been having Papagayos, fierce offshore winds that can blow up to thirty knots in the mornings. Combine the big surf with strong offshore winds and you have the recipe for perfect surf, hollow monsters tubing down the beaches in all directions. The whole town has gone surf crazy and the broken boards are piling up on the beaches.
To backtrack a bit, on my first night here I was invited aboard an expedition catamaran for a party. The Costa Rican crew became fast friends and changed my whole opinion of Costa Ricans, which was not so hot after my experiences eight years ago. Our two boats are about a hundred yards apart in the anchorage.
One great surf break, Langosta, lies about a mile south of Tamarindo Bay, where the boats are anchored. One morning Larry and I took my little dinghy with the 3.3 horsepower motor, putted around the point down to Langosta, anchored the dinghy just outside the surf, and went surfing. No problem.
Yesterday I did the same thing on my own, but with ten foot surf pounding everywhere. I had to go way out to sea to get around the outside reefs, which only break in these huge swells. I anchored the dinghy and went surfing, but the surf kept building and breaking further and further out, so I kept thinking the dinghy was going to get nailed.
I paddled back out to the dinghy and pulled the anchor, but the Papagayos had kicked in with violence and it was howling about thirty offshore. Again I had to go way out to sea to get around the outside reefs—which had twenty foot walls breaking on them—and once out there found myself battling against a fierce, steep chop. I could barely hold onto my board, which wanted to fly away, as my little 8-foot inflatable pounded into wave after wave, making slow and painful progress. With all the spray the boat was slowly filling with water as the little 3.3 horsepower struggled.
And then it died. I was suddenly in a very dangerous situation, being blown out to sea by thirty knot winds. I was already about a mile offshore, and a good mile and a half from Condesa.
I wrote recently in an article entitled Inflatable Nirvana that rowing is not one of these small boat’s strong points. I didn’t have oars anyway, not that it would make any difference against a thirty-knot headwind. You need a motor to make these boats move. Time for triage:
Plan A: Try with all due haste to get the engine running again. Yes, there was gas in the tank.
Plan B: Tie the dinghy’s bow line around my ankle and try towing it while paddling on the surfboard. No, I didn’t have any faith whatsoever in making any headway in this manner, but I figured I had to try it before jettisoning $2500 worth of dinghy, motor, and associated gear.
Plan C: Jettison $2500 worth of dinghy, motor, and associated gear, and paddle back to Condesa on the surfboard to save my life. This would have taken many hours, but I would have been able to make headway, even in the rough conditions. I would have let out all the anchor rode and left the anchor dragging to slow the drift with the outside chance that I’d be able to get someone with a fast boat to charge out to sea and try to find the dinghy, but it would drift pretty quickly.
Luckily plan A worked, but it wasn’t easy disassembling the motor while bucking around, all the while losing ground at 2-3 knots. The motor didn’t run well, but it ran if I kept choking it and restarting it when it died, all the while sounding like a dying cow.
I made it home, exhausted, having learned my lesson about long sea journeys in small boats.
As if that wasn’t enough adventure, the next day I was making my way along the road, back to check on Condesa, when I noticed some activity around her. I’d slept in a spare apartment that Larry the real estate shark had in town, since the conditions made it so rough to sleep on Condesa. After pushing through the trees to where I had a clear view, I could see that Condesa was the subject of a full-blown salvage operation. She’d dragged her anchor toward the rocks, and there were no less than four boats involved in towing her out and putting her on a spare mooring. I ran down the beach, unlocked my Windsurfer board from its tree, and paddled out as fast as my arms could take me. Disaster had already been averted, but I streamlined matters in getting the engine started, the anchor winch running, and generally turning Condesa into an active salvage victim, rather than a passive one.
I gave out whatever bottles of booze I had onboard, but I can’t really do enough to thank the guys who made this heroic effort to save, well, everything I am and everything I own. I’ve been on the giving end of many such operations, and also recieved many such bottles of booze and cases of beer. Such is the law of the sea.
I had 200 feet of chain out in twenty feet of water, so ten-to-one scope, and Condesa had been holding in strong winds in that same spot for days, but these Papagayos can be scary.
Clark February 27th, 2008
I’m in northern Costa Rica, sitting in my friend Larry’s real estate office. Since I’ve cruised this country before, I sailed up the whole coast in less than a week. I tried to check in at Quepos, but there’s no customs office there. They insist that it’s a port of entry, but that they just don’t have customs: Kind of like a restaurant that doesn’t have food. I ended up cruising for a week before finally checking in at El Coco, where it was the usual two day ordeal.
I’ve been fishing like a madman, trying to put some fresh food on the table. After getting much advice on the subject, I bought some new lures and switched back to my old rod and reel. I was using bombproof handlines made of clothesline and stainless cable, and having pretty good results over the years with little loss of tackle, but the locals say the fish here are more discerning.
Unfortunately one of the fish I hook most is the Jack Cravelle. As I learned clear back in the days of cruising with Brian Sherman, the Jack Cravelle is a great fighter and a game fish, but pretty much inedible. We tried to eat one once and it was like fish flavored cat food, brown and bloody. So I’ve been on the catch and release program for years with the hapless Jack Cravelle.
One day, motoring along southern Costa Rica, the reel exploded, I stopped the boat, and spent a good half hour fighting a fish. When I got it to the surface I could see that it was, unfortunately, a Jack Cravelle, and such a giant Jack Cravelle that I wouldn’t be able to pull up on deck with the leader to dislodge the hook. The other option was to gaff the fish, but that sort of takes the kindness out of the whole catch and release thing.
While I was wondering how to save my poor Jack Cravelle, I saw some movement beneath him. The water was crystal clear and I was wearing polarized sunglasses. I soon saw that the movement was three sharks, species unknown, who made very quick and surgical work of the Jack Cravelle. They made a coordinated attack of rapid strikes, leaving almost nothing of the fish, and scarcely a drop of blood in the water. The whole thing took less than two seconds, and this fish probably weighed thirty pounds. I always think of sharks getting frenzied and going for anything they can sink their teeth into, but these sharks bit in rapid sucession to avoid biting each other, and seemed to get in about two strikes each before the fish was gone.
I was thinking, oh great, now I’m going to have a big shark on my line to contend with. Nope, the sharks avoided the hook with such precision that I was left with just the poor fish’s mouth and the hook.
I had a similar experience a few years ago when I initiated a feeding frenzy in Chagos. I strapped a swim fin to a tuna carcass, thinking that a swim fin with a shark bite out of it would be a fun memento. The sharks consumed the tuna in its entirity, and never even scratched the fin.
Nice to know that when you’re being eaten by a shark they’ll probably leave your watch.
Clark with Tamarindo real estate shark, Larry McKinney
Clark February 20th, 2008
My poor mother has been worried sick at times about my gallivanting around the world in a small sailboat and getting run over by container ships. But now I can finally give her something to put her mind at ease. My mom is an artist. In fact, if you try to Google me on the web you’ll probably get to her, Sandy Clark Beek, artist, first. How fitting that with her being an artist I can convey my message with fine art. Amazing likeness, eh mom?
Clark February 15th, 2008
To say I’m leaving Panama is a relative term. I’m officially checked out, but I probably won’t actually leave port until tomorrow. Then it will take a whole day to get down the river, then a night at Boca Chica, then a night out in the islands, then finally around Punta Burica into Costa Rica. So I won’t actually be leaving Panama for four days, but this is my last hurrah at the Internet cafe.
Since I’m officially checked out and it’s not likely that the officials visit this website, I can declare that they are corrupt theiving bastards! Actually the Port Captain’s office and Port Authority are on the up-and-up, fast, efficient, and friendly. The agricultural inspector, the immigration guy, and the customs guy are slime.
The agricultural guy asked me for $35, which I gave to him, then he gave me a receipt for $15. I balked and he made up some crap about another inspection and said he would give me a reciept if I had a piece of paper. He scrawled out a reciept on a piece of notebook paper which means nothing. He scammed me out of $20 and there’s no way I’m getting it back. So now I can tell the world: Santiago Ruiz is a bad man! He abuses his authority! I guess it’s not really corruption because corruption would mean he’s stealing money from the Panamanian people. The Panamanian people got their $15 bucks, but I lost another $20 that went into his pocket, so I guess it’s abuse of power to con and steal.
The immigration guy now has thousands of retired Americans living in the area so he’s ‘in business.’ He is famous for kicking people out of the immigration office for wearing shorts: You must be respectibly dressed to be in a government office. Meanwhile he is unshaven and usually wears a white, but yellowed, sweat stained, short sleeved polyester shirt.
I went into the immigration office at 4:30 one day, just before the office closed. He asked me what time I got into port and I stupidly said 7:00. Since this is outside of business hours he said I’d be charged overtime charges of $45, payable in cash to him, plus I’d have to go to the national bank and pay $10. There was a long standoff and he came back with the ubiquitous, ‘¿Que hacemos?’ This is Spanish for, ‘Show me the money and you’re done.’ Since I’m on a strict anticorruption policy, I said I’d go to the bank in the morning when it opened and see him afterwords. Funny thing, the next day when the office was packed with employees and visa applicants he didn’t mention that $45.
The customs guy has been scamming every boat for $20. I just said, ‘No, there’s no charge for customs. Never has been. I’m not paying.’ He was furious, but there was nothing he could do.
Sadly, Panama has been the most corrupt country I’ve visited in the world. It’s the only place I’ve ever paid an all-out bribe, $100 to a Port Captain eight years ago. In hindsight, I don’t know if I actually did anything wrong, but he’d confiscated our passports, arrested me, and alluded to confiscation of Condesa, plus he had a gun.
Some argue that a corrupt system is still a functional system, that it’s just our cultural bias that prevents us from accepting it as it is. Sorry, corruption is bad. It means jobs don’t get done and money doesn’t go where it’s supposed to. The victims and the Panamanian people suffer for it. I guess I’d be singing a different tune if I were buying myself out of some jail time, but strangely enough, I seem to usually be on the right side of the law in these situations.
Clark February 11th, 2008
Back at home most people would just pop into Beds, Booms, and Beyond to pick up a new boom, but here in the hinterlands we fix things, because we don’t have a choice. Not only do we save ourselves a little money, but we help reduce the growing problem of broken sailboat booms overflowing the nation’s landfills. Here’s how:
First, we break a boom. This was due to pure laziness: using a vang when I should have used a proper preventer. Idiot!
Note the boom, now disentangled from the main sail, lying on the side deck. The inboard stub is still attached to the main mast. Also note that with a ketch we’ve still got another boom back there, but we’re crippled and this situation must be tended to at the next opportunity. See the dark clouds in the background? That’s the remnants of the squall that got us.
After arrival in Nuqui the Bond Girls deserted me after the kidnappings and left me to my fate with the terrorists. It was time to get to work. I selected an appropriate piece of mangrove timber and transported it back to Condesa.
While the piece of mangrove was fairly round, I had to debark it and make it rounder.
Note the look of determination on my face. The plane and I were one. After several hours and many trials, the shape was getting close. It also made a big mess:
Finally it was finished and ready for a ‘compression fit.’ I had already carefully hacksawed off the daggy bits of aluminum on either side of the break.
While this repair is a triumph of ingenuity, if I do say so my self, it is only temporary. Wood doesn’t like damp enclosed spaces, and our mangrove probably started to rot the moment I stuck it in there.
After crossing the Gulf of Panama I made my way to David, Panama, where my old buddy Domenic has settled and has a shop:
Domenic is English, so henceforth we shall refer to the material from which my boom is constructed as aluminium, which is what Sir Humphry Davy decided to name it after he discovered it, so we Americans can just suck it up.
Domenic took over from here, starting by riveting a stout aluminium sleeve inside the two broken halves:
And after that he heliarc welded the break:
Kudos to Domenic. It’s probably stronger than before. Domenic also fixed my broken outboard in his shop. It turned out to be a seized piston ring. It’s good to have friends like Domenic, who work for beer and homemade enchiladas.
The boom is now back in place and ready to head out of Panama this week for Costa Rica and points north. By the way, I made it all the way up the river to David on pure memory from eight years ago, and didn’t run aground once. Hoping for a similar result on the way down.
If only Domenic could fix computers. Mine is now on it’s way to San Francisco via FedEx.
Clark February 1st, 2008
The anchorage at Boca Chica, Panama:
After all that easy downwind sailing up the South American coast, I forgot how truly miserable an offshore passage can be. By 2AM on the second night I’d made a pact with myself to sell the boat and become a bean farmer. Such sentiments always drift away after a cold beer and a good night’s sleep.
I left Colombia, as planned, at 5AM. I intended this to be after a good night’s sleep, but I had a coffee late in the day–the only way to fire up any motivation in that sticky heat–and ended up cleaning the boat at 1AM and only getting a few hours sleep. There was not a breath of wind and I was actually feeling guilty about burning so much fuel. Ha ha. No wind didn’t mean calm though: It was horribly rough and lumpy. It was rough and lumpy with no wind eight years ago too, so I can only conclude with my sample size of two days that the Gulf of Panama is always like that. Anyway, they were the kind of conditions that make people seasick who don’t get seasick–violent rail-to-rail rolls all day long.
Then the wind came up and started to howl. It turns out that strong offshore winds are the norm for Panama in January and February, but I didn’t know this before I set out. They were exactly like our Southern Californian Santa Ana winds: hot, dry, strong, and gusty. Of course they were right on the nose with the continued violent seas. I suffered through the first night of this, not getting a wink of sleep. If I could have thrown in the towel and reached off to somehwere-anywhere-I would have, but my options were the Galapagos or Isla de Coco, both many hundreds of miles away. So I had to keep closehauled and pounding into it.
I slogged upwind with the sails reefed down to nothing, the first time I’d reefed since the Roaring Forties. I’ll spare you all the horrible things that happened to me, but some highlights are: A) scalding very sesitive parts of my body (solo in the tropics–why wear clothes?) when the coffee pot jumped off the stove. B) Having the fish cleaning board fall on my foot…still bruised. and C) Well into my second sleepless night, and after not getting but a couple hours the night before I left, the sleep situation was getting desperate. I finally found that the only place on the entire boat that held any hope of sleep was on the floor in the aft cabin. I put a camping pad, a sheet, and my pillow there, along with the requisite Casio alarm clock, set to go off at 15 minute intervals. By the way, I don’t need to hear the sound of that Casio alarm clock again for the rest of my life. The next alarm clock I get is going to have a selection of different alarm noises, one of them perhaps being a sexy woman’s voice saying, ‘Clark, please wake up.’ Anyway, at this point I was pretty close to Panama and was just motoring straight into it for the last 30 miles. I’d opened one porthole to get some ventilation when the boat rolled hard to port, scooped about a thousand gallons of seawater into the scuppers, then deposited much of it on my sheet, my pad, my pillow, and the one place on the entire boat that held any hope of getting any sleep. I took it with maturity and grace: ‘Evil God! Why hath thou forsaken me!’ By then I was getting into the shipping lanes from the Panama Canal and decided I shouldn’t be sleeping anyway.
I finally made my landfall in the wee hours at Punta Guanaco, a horrible, rough anchorage, but I didn’t care. I slept for five hours somehow, woke up to a violently rolling boat, and couldn’t go back to sleep. I sailed her another ten miles to the east to Banao, where there was a very protected anchorage and a great surf break. I slept, I ate, I surfed great waves and talked surf talk with the locals.
When I was walking back up the beach after surfing I looked out at Condesa and she looked unmistakably small. I stopped in my tracks, looked at her, and thought geeze, I just sailed across 200 miles of storm-wracked ocean in that little thing? And then I imagined what I must have looked like, a hundred miles from land in the middle of the night, up on deck bathed in the spreader lights–the only light for a long way around–struggling to reef the main, getting slammed by waves and spray. Amazing little machines, these cruising sailboats.
The next few days were halcyon cruising, although those offshore winds turned into some violent williwaws close to shore and some of the big gusts were about as much wind as Condesa has ever seen. I took three days to western Panama, stopping at a perfect anchorage every night. This is definitely the season for Panama with these dry conditions. It isn’t the wet and rainy Central America I remember, but a dry, clear place with visibility over 50 miles. And a strong contrast to Colombia, which was dank.
As I neared my final destination a huge helicopter came out of nowhere with a giant TV camera hanging out the side, flew a couple circles around me, waved, and flew off. Am I going to be on the Panamanian evening news?
I was into my old stomping grounds from eight years ago and pulled into Boca Chica, where eight years ago it would have been a surprise to see another boat. Now there are twelve! And two resorts. And Frank’s place, which used to be a very basic backpacker’s affair, is now a triple-level place with flashing lights everywhere. Frank hasn’t changed a bit, still a rude, mean krout, only grumpier from another eight years of dealing with customers, whom he obviously hates.
Now I’ve had two good nights at a mill pond anchorage and socialized a bit with the cruising set, which is strange since I’ve grown accustomed to having a whole country to myself. But today I was getting ready for my foray into to town when I went into the aft cabin to get some clothes. Normally I never go back there unless I’ve got guests. There was still the remnants of my wet hamster nest from the passage, a quick flashback to the misery I have now so willingly forgotten.
My computer woes are still dire, but I can publish some of the photos that are still on the cameras:
We were warned about the evil pirates and terrorists on the Colombian coast. Here’s proof:
Here’s the broken main boom off Cabo Corrientes, Colombia:
