Captain's Log

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January 2007:  Belize & Honduras

01-01-2007:  Those of us that celebrated together last night were invited to Lone Star Love for a New Year's Day brunch and to celebrate Kaija’s birthday.  We had Bloody Mary with biscuits and sausage gravy, Texas style with fried eggs on the side.  For desert we had one of Kaija’s favorites, brownies.  After the feast we all went fishing to work off some of that big meal. 

01-02-2007:  The weather was starting to settle a bit and we knew that Toni had gone to Germany for his surgery.  We are thinking that tomorrow will be a good day to sail back to the main land of Belize so that we can check out of the country and start making our way to Honduras.

The next morning we have the anchor up at 6:45AM and are headed to the main land.  We go thru Glory Cut and are behind the reef by 11:10AM.  Fast sail!  We are in the inner channel having a great sail when a squall comes up from our port stern.  The winds are starting to really crank up so we start taking in some sail.  We had winds gusting up to 46 knots and rain was coming sideways.  Wow, exciting sailing, but it passed quickly.  We arrived in Sapodilla Lagoon and got the anchor down at 3:55PM.  We threw our line into the water and started pulling catfish in 5 minutes after we had the anchor down.  Yum Yum, we are having fresh saltwater catfish for dinner.  It was so fun catching them right off the boat at anchor and they were really good to eat.  

01-04-2007:  We had a relaxing morning and didn’t pull the anchor up till 9:00AM.  That’s late for us to get underway.  We had a good sail to Placencia arriving at 12:30PM.  That evening we went to dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant with Wendy and Sam from Maestro and Neil and Kathy from Attitude.  It was fun to enjoy a meal out!  After dinner we were all invited to Attitude for coffee and conversation.  Greg and Neil made plans to go to immigrations and the port captain to check out together in the morning.

01-05-2007:  Last night while we were out to dinner our Texas friends, Sandy and Cheri on Namaste’ came in and anchored.  Sandy came over first thing in the morning to see if Greg would mind looking at his transmission.  They were having problems with it.  Greg would go and check out first and then come back and check things out on Namaste’ transmission.

Greg and Judy went to Namaste’ and while the guys worked, Cheri and Judy had a chance to catch up on new business.  We have not seen them since June of last year so it was old home week.  Greg made some adjustments to the transmission that would make it work perfectly, however he discovered that the motor and transmission were out of alignment.  Sandy and Cheri decided that they would also leave in the morning and go back to the Rio so that a mechanic they know can align the engine and transmission. 

With the work completed we decided to go have lunch together and at the Purple Space Monkey and check emails while we had lunch.  We were trying to check our email and could not get in.  We were told that the local provider blocks a lot of sites and that ours may be blocked so we just blew it off and decided we would check it when we got to La Ceiba, which will only be a couple of more days.

01-06-2007:  Rita has emailed us on the ships email and she is wondering what our arrival date might be.  Toni has been gone a week and she has some work in the outboard shop for Greg when we get there.  We let her know we are underway to La Ceiba now and should be there no later then the 8th.

We have the anchor up at daybreak headed for Ranguana Pass.  We had our first and only fish of the trip, a Spanish mackerel at 7:30AM.   Once we get to Ranguana Pass we will decide if we go to Punta Sal or straight to Utila.  We were through the pass at 9:30AM. The seas were big rolls with just a few knots of wind out of the southeast.  That would be our direction to Punta Sal, so we opt to head to Utila.   We thought we would be in Utila by about 8PM. 

Then the wind changed and turned on our nose, not much at first but then picking up to 20 to 25 knots.  We turned and tacked off the wind but the seas were building and our speed had slowed to 4 knots and less.  We made a final tack into East Bay, Utila arriving and 1:00AM, January 7th.  We were tired and decided to sleep as late as we could in the morning before sailing on to La Ceiba.

We departed for La Ceiba at 8:45AM and had a beautiful sail to La Ceiba.  We arrived at Lagoon Marina at 12:30.  Rita was very glad to see us and had things for Greg to look at as soon as he could.  Rita’s son Florien helped us wash all the salt off the boat and get thing squared away.  We took a lot of green water over the bow last night so it was nice to get Lone Star Love cleaned up.

Greg goes off to see the list of items he will be working on in the morning and Judy checks our web based email.  She discovers that there was nothing blocked in Belize; it is not working in Honduras either. 

01-08-2007:  Greg is off to work and Judy starts emailing our web hosting company.  They respond back to us telling us that it has been canceled.  We find out that while we are off sailing around in Belize and at the Atolls where there is no internet that our hosting company says they sent us an email telling us that our credit card expiration date has expired and that they needed a new expiration date.  They also tell us that they only keep back up of our web site for seven days, so we are way past the seven days and all is lost.  All our emails and the entire web site are completely gone.  Needless to say, that did not make our day!

We contact Tami and Thane of SaltySailors.com to see if they can build us a new site.  They have built web sites for a lot of cruisers, so we are excited to get a new look and a new start.  They are also cruisers and know what cruising is all about and can work with us.  So if our new site looks a little incomplete it is that some of our history things were lost and we had no way to recover them.   So, just bear with us and enjoy the newest items on our site.

So since we have been in La Ceiba, Greg has been running the outboard repair shop in Toni’s absence and now that Toni is back he is starting to get the strength back in his knee.  Judy has been working with Tami, via emails to reconstruct and build a new web site.  We are thankful to have really good internet service at Lagoon Marina to work on the site. 

01-27-2007:  We decide it time to take a break for the weekend and take Lone Star Love out to Cayos Cochinos.  It is only 17 miles from La Ceiba and we want to clean the bottom and get some swim time in.  We also want to make water and fill our tank back up.  We make water all the way and have made about 100 gallons by the time we arrive.  We will finish filling our tank in the morning.

We head into Plantation Beach Resort to look around and have a sundowner.  We run into Rusty and Brazen and visit with him a bit.  He invites us to join him in the morning to go to the Garifuna village on one of the cays.  This will be interesting as we have never been there.

We have talked to Toni and Rita by phone and they are planning to pick us up with their speed boat, Guidditch and take us to Isla Paradiso for lunch.  But, before that we are going to go with Rusty and check out the Garifuna village. 

The village is peaceful and quiet with children playing.  It is Sunday so many of the islanders are relaxing and enjoying a day with their families.  Most of the village men are fisherman and even though these waters are protected form any fishing, the villagers are allowed to fish since this is their homeland and they have inhabited this island long before it became protected.  We head back to our boat before lunch to await our ride to the restaurant located a couple of miles away form where we are moored.

Toni, Rita, Stefanie and Florien arrived to pick us up at noon and we head off to Isla Paradiso for lunch with Wilfried and Birgit.  They put out a wonderful meal.  Roast Pork, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut along with German beer and cake for desert.  What a feast! 

We had to leave and get back to Lone Star Love since we still had to sail back to La Ceiba.  It only takes about two minutes for Toni to take us back to Lone Star Love.  Guidditch is very fast.  We untied from the mooring and left Cayos at 3:00PM and arrived back at La Ceiba at 7:00PM.

Greg is still helping out Toni and Judy is still working on the web site.  Our plan at this time is that Greg will finish working the end of February.  We are planning to stay here for a big birthday party that is being planned for Stefanie’s 15th birthday, which will be on March 3rd and then we are headed out.