Hi and Merry Christmas! We hope you are all happy and well. We are not in a position to send you a Christmas card this year (which we otherwise would have for sure!) due to the fact that there is no post office here.

We are in a little island group called the Los Roques off the coast of Venezuela. There are lots of fish, some lobsters, several shipwrecks and almost unlimited sand and coral, but no mailboxes, very few people, and no phones.

If you ever need to get away from it all for a couple weeks we would recommend this place. It is a short flight from Caracas (in a DC3) but it is really the island paradise that you read about in travel mags. The main town has a small airport but sand streets with no cars. There is approximately 80 miles of surrounding reef, and at least 54 islands inside of the reef. There are probably a couple hundred miles of deserted, white powder sand beach and some of the best diving that we’ve ever seen.

Our last stop was the island of Tortuga, which was also a fascinating place. We spent almost a month there and enjoyed excellent diving, many lobsters that wanted to be eaten and great friends. Our friends on the boat Casa del Mar were there and later our friends on Maravida showed up as well. Art and Corinne on Casa del Mar are the lobster hunting gurus. On the day they arrived we nabbed 13 lobsters, clearly an excuse for a huge feast! Who needs a side dish when you have 13 lobsters? All of us went diving one day at a place where the shore shelved from 5 feet deep to 100 in about 100 horizontal feet. This made it a difficult place to anchor but the reward was fantastic diving with big neon fish along the drop off and beautiful clear blue water. The visibility was truly incredible at over 80 feet.

One day Marc from Maravida and I were sitting around below when we heard someone whistling at us from outside. This happens regularly and usually means that a fisherman would like to trade lobsters or fish to us for whatever he happens to need. We went up above and there was the African Queen. Okay, maybe not the original but the Venezuelan fishermen use boats that look exactly like the African Queen. This one had 5 or 6 guys on board and they were calling for a camera. This was an odd request, but we eventually realized that they had a huge Marlin on board. The fisherman invited us onto their boat and we took photos of the impressive fish and the crew with promises to mail them a copy of the photos. It was over 12 feet long and they guessed 300 kilos! That’s a big fish and they had caught it on the same hook that you use when fishing for a 10-pound fish. When we get to Bonaire and have Internet access we’ll put the photo up on our site. See big fish photo.

Before we headed out to Tortuga and the Roques we were in Puerto La Cruz in Venezuela for about a month. We had left the boat there, lifted out of the water while we returned to Canada for a couple months to visit family and friends. When we got back from Canada, we had to paint the bottom of the boat with anti-fouling, and then do a few maintenance jobs. We also needed to load the boat up with groceries and fuel for a few months in the islands. Groceries were not a problem, but the day before we were ready to leave, the authorities closed down the local fuel dock.  This happened because they caught the boys from the fuel dock involved in a fuel smuggling ring. None of this will make sense until you know that diesel in Venezuela costs 3 cents Canadian per litre, whereas 200 miles away in Martinique it is $2 per litre. Apparently some local guys with an old shrimp boat decided that they could make more money in the transport business than in the shrimp business, unfortunately while filling their hold with diesel in the dead of night, they accidentally spilled several thousand litres into the bay. This naturally brought the police into the picture and the upshot was that the fuel dock was closed down just when we were ready to leave and we weren’t leaving until we were full to the brim with inexpensive diesel. We waited for about a week for it to reopen as the response each day was “Manana, manana” and then decided that we would try out the fuel dock 5 miles away. We arrived a couple minutes before they opened on a Monday morning. The operators were just arriving and they shouted out to us that they had no diesel. “No problem, we’ll wait.” we said, as we tied up to their dock. “Oh, the truck won’t be here till 10:00 AM.” “No problem, we’ll wait.” “It could be even later, 11:00 or 12:00.” “No problem, we’ll wait.” Luckily we had Art and Corinne from Casa del Mar and Ian from Gecko with us for entertainment. We got out the dominos and Pictionary and played games until 3 PM when the truck finally showed up.

We had to pay the extra high price at this dock for some reason, total cost for 530 litres of fuel: $15.00! Venezuela is a fun place for money, when you change $500 you get one million Bolivars and you’re an instant millionaire! Of course you need a backpack to carry all of those ten thousand Bolivar notes and oddly they spend pretty much like a five-dollar bill.

While we were in Puerto La Cruz, I had the pleasure of obtaining a prescription from a local doctor. Of course my Spanish is pretty fractured and the words I know tend to be used mostly in machine shops rather than hospitals so this was a slow process. First I stood outside the doctor’s inner office for 15 minutes or so before some kind soul instructed me to go inside and sit at her desk. As soon as I sat down an orderly and a nurse began trying to understand why I was there. Since it was pretty slow going, they got some help from a janitor, another patient and the mother of the other patient. After they had tortured me for a while, the doctor showed up and I got to go through the entire process again with all six of them pitching in to keep me honest. Eventually the doctor decided that she knew what my issue was, and so she asked “Why was I in her office?” It turns out that in Venezuela, there is rarely (or perhaps never) a need for a prescription if you know the drug that you want, you just go directly to the pharmacy.

Our biggest excitement of the last 6 months came in July while in Grenada, the southernmost island in the Caribbean island chain. The insurance companies say that Grenada is South of the hurricane zone so many boats go there to wait out the season. In 2004 that went badly wrong when Hurricane Ivan made a direct hit as a Category 3 storm with something like 150 MPH winds. It put dozens of boats up on the rocks and knocked hundreds off their stands in the boatyards and sank many more. The number of damaged and destroyed boats was staggering. It was probably even worse for the locals, we’ve heard that every single building on the island had damage and over 90 percent of roofs were lost. Roads were badly damaged, trees knocked down, the nutmeg crop destroyed for seven years and the cocoa crop destroyed for two.  This was their first hurricane in 50 years so it caught both locals and boaters by surprise.

We were further north in the Tobago Cays when a low pressure system started to form out in the Atlantic. We decided that we should push south to Grenada where it was less likely to hit should it develop into a hurricane. But fate had other plans for us. We arrived on July 12th and Hurricane Emily scored a direct hit on us in the middle of the night on the 13th. It was still just a tropical storm only hours before it reached us but in those last few hours it wound itself up to almost a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 80 knots and gusts to 100 knots. I can tell you that that’s more wind than we ever care to encounter again.

We knew that it was coming so we had lots of time to prepare, which meant getting all of the sails down below and putting out four anchors. We had found a small bay in Clarks Court that had only one other boat anchored in it. This seemed like a good choice to us because we normally think that the greatest danger comes from other boats that are not well anchored. Many people in the Caribbean anchor their boats very close to shore and tie one end into the mangrove trees when there is a storm coming. We had never seen this done before and thought that we’d be safer with multiple anchors several hundred feet from the nearest shoreline. A few hours before the first strong winds were forecast to arrive, a very beat up boat which was in the middle of being repaired from last year’s Ivan damage, came in and anchored fairly near us and directly upwind in the direction where we expected to get the worst winds. This was a very bad outcome for us but it was much too late for us to think about moving. We watched this boat for a while and when it was clear that they intended to make no preparations I decided to go suggest some.  I would be very cranky with anyone who came to give me advice, but I was glad to have done it in this case, because the old guy on board was a disabled Vietnam vet named Ted and he really couldn’t get his work done alone. We got his sails down and discussed strategies, the main ones being that he would motor into it if he needed to and I’d be shining a searchlight on him if he seemed to be dragging.

The hurricane hunter planes were flying through the storm (we believe we saw one) and reporting that it had internal speeds of 80 knots with gusts to 100 knots and forward motion of about 17 knots. This means that if you are on the North side, you could experience 97 knots of wind and the south side should see about 63 maximum and if the eye goes over you should see about 80. These are all dangerous wind speeds for us. We thought that we should have Tropical Storm force winds (35 to 64 knots) by about 8 PM, but it stayed pretty quiet until around 11. By around 1 we had hurricane force winds from the East and Ted was dragging toward us. We flashed a searchlight on his boat and eventually he started his engine and began motoring into it to take the strain off his anchors. Sometime shortly after that the wind began to move around to the North and get lighter which seemed to indicate that we were South of the eye or possibly in the eye. Suddenly the wind began to hammer us from the West, much higher than we had had from the East to the point that you could not open your eyes while looking into it or stand upright on deck. We put on snorkels and masks and were able to see a little bit. Ted was forgotten since he was now downwind and no longer a danger to us, but the small unattended boat that had been in the bay when we arrived was dragging down toward us at a high speed. I raced back to the cockpit and screaming at the top of my lungs to be heard over the wind told Susan to start the engine and try to dodge the boat, meanwhile I crawled back on deck to move fenders to the appropriate side and try to keep a light on the boat so she could see where to steer. For hours we dodged this boat although the control was very minimal with so much wind and no visibility. At one point it was within 15 feet of us and neither of us could see how we were going to come out of this without some damage. Eventually we caught one of our own anchor lines in the prop, cut it, wound it up on the prop shaft and were unable to use the engine. Although this was a bad thing, the wind had started to drop and the small boat seemed to have settled a few yards away so the timing could have been a lot worse. By dawn the wind was down to tropical storm force and by about 8:30 things were improving. We spent the next couple days putting the boat back together and diving for the lost anchor, which we never found. The diving was interesting for me as I have never scuba dived before. The local dive shop didn’t care if I was certified as long as I had cash and a friend on another boat gave me a quick 15-minute dive course. The visibility in the water was terrible but it was a cool experience to go underwater and stay there essentially as long as I wanted.

Ted had motored into the storm all night long dragging his two anchors along. Since he has an inside steering station and radar this worked pretty well for him. Our friends on another boat had tied up in the mangroves a few hundred yards away and had a pretty easy time of it. The big danger for them would be getting hit by a runaway boat but things were out of their hands once the storm began. We had other friends tied in the mangroves on another nearby island. They were driven up into the mangroves by the storm and had to get a tow to get the boat off, but they suffered very little damage other than to their paint. In the future we plan to go into the mangroves if that option exists, although we hope to never find ourselves in the path of a hurricane again.

After the storm, we rented a car and drove around a little on the island. Hurricane Ivan, the year before, was obviously a lot worse, but there was still plenty of damage from this storm. Many of the roofs that came off last year were only partially repaired and so they came off again this year and especially at the North end of the island there were a lot of trees down. We passed over several bridges that were completely plugged on the upstream side with fallen trees and detritus and had floods pouring over the road. It looked like there was some chance that the bridges might collapse.

After we last wrote in June from Antigua we moved fairly quickly down the eastern Caribbean island chain stopping at most of the islands such as Guadeloupe, Isles des Saintes, Dominica, Martinique and Bequia. We enjoyed the Grenadines in the southern section the most. Here we were finally introduced to some of that famous Caribbean underwater scenery. This was our first experience with such colourful and varied coral reefs.

We’ve continued to enjoy world-class snorkeling throughout the Venezuelan islands. It is hard to put into words how spellbinding it is to float through grottos of enormous, colourful coral of so many shapes and varieties. At times you feel that you’ve been dropped into a giant salt-water aquarium that is stocked with every conceivable tropical fish. There is so much life to see especially in the Venezuelan waters. Here we’ve had to get used to that feeling that you are being followed around as the curious barracuda laze along behind you. There are also close encounters with turtles, rays, conch, squid and of course, the elusive and tasty lobster. The tiny little angel fish can be the most amusing as these little 4 inch fish take a run at you to scare you away from their well-protected homes.

One of the greatest improvements in our cruising life this time around is the ability to keep in contact with friends and family back home. On our last trip, we wrote a lot of letters sent by 3rd world snail mail and spent a lot of time crowded around a pay phone having difficult conversations over bad connections. Now you can find an internet café in almost any sized town and wireless internet connections are becoming more and more common in and around anchorages and marinas. Recently we discovered the joy of Skype (www.skype.com), which allows us to have phone conversations with family using our laptop and a microphone headset any time that we are near enough to civilization to have a high-speed internet connection. These calls cost only 2.5 cents Canadian per minute if we call a land phone and are free if we call directly to another computer. It is really a fantastic service.

To see photos from the Windward Islands, click here.

To see photos from Venezuela, click here.