May, 2005:

Finally got the boat back in the water last weekend, got her over to Utila from La Ceiba for a final few days of preparation and crew recruitment for the jaunt back to Rio Dulce. I ended up having to bring Andiamo back solo, which was interestingly the first time I ever had to do that. It was cool, and I even anchored solo ok. I didn’t sail because winds were light, and I didn’t want to raise my new main with just me aboard. All I needed was something to go wrong with it at the wrong time, which has always been the case anyway.

The day after I got back, we put together a fun day of sailing around Utila with a bunch of people. Monica (from Tranquila) and Claire, the Irish dive instructor, who was spending her last day on the island that Sunday, put it together for the most part. I promised Claire I’d get her out on the boat before she left. A bunch of people from around town showed up for the trip. It ended up being a nice group of people, about 10 of us total. We headed out about noon, and got back in time for sunset. There was some light breeze, which gave us a nice easy sail along the Utila coast. There was lots of food, beer, cocktails, beer, more beer and then we ran out of anything. Probably a good thing too.

All week last week, I got some loose ends tied up, took care of some final issues on Andiamo, which was looking pretty damn good with her newly spot-painted, polished and buffed topsides, and new main! I put the word out for crew, and within a matter of hours, I had 3 crewmembers lined up. All Americans too, which was another first on Andiamo. The crew was going to consist of Mahia (yes, that’s her name, no snickers!) from Colorado, Katherine from Oregon, and Sabrina from California. None had any sailing experience except for Mahia, whose only sailing experience was her trip on Andiamo that fateful Sunday. So after giving them the lowdown, I affectionately gave them the moniker, “Sea Cadets”. Not sure if they liked it or not, but it served them well.

While getting some last minute details ready for our Thursday departure, a storm started brewing up in the Pacific off the coast of El Salvador. It ended up becoming Tropical Storm Adrian, the first official storm of the hurricane season, which hadn’t even started yet!
The storm was going to cross Central America and find its way to the Caribbean, and pass over right around the Bay Islands.

My first instinct was to wait and see what the storm did, but then I realized that I would much rather be up the Rio Dulce, then on Utila if the storm blew by. It was not going to be anything more than a tropical depression by the time it reached there anyway, having been weakened by the mountainous Honduran and Guatemalan landmass. So despite more conservative wisdom from others, I decided we would leave, albeit a bit earlier on Thursday.

The ride over was quite easy, but not much wind. We motorsailed most of the way. The winds did kick up in the middle of the night, but unfortunately it was right on our nose. I kept the motor going most of the time because we really had to keep our schedule of getting into Livingston at high tide, which was 5:30 AM Friday. We did get a few final hours of good light breeze sailing on our approach to Livingston. We made it to the mouth of the Rio Dulce right on time, went over the bar of the river with nary a single touch (a first on Andiamo!). We dropped our anchor off the main dock at Livingston, ending what was an absolutely flawless 17-hour passage.

So after another wonderful ride up the Rio Dulce (a first for all three Sea Cadets), we tied up at our usual dock, where Andiamo will be for awhile during the next few months during the inevitable hurricane season. I had too busy of a hurricane season last year to even consider being out there this year. Nope this season, I’m taking a break. I’ll be doing some overseas traveling, and possibly a visit to Florida during this time. The cats will be hanging out with the boat under close supervision of course. Which is great for them because they will be able to venture off the boat around the marina. Lots of room to roam. It’s relatively safe for them, because they can’t go very far on account of lots of dogs on the property. But they can go far enough to get a nice “break” from the boat.

Waiting to hear back from some friends in Antigua to see about doing one last junket to Lago Izabal for a couple of days before getting Andiamo nestled at the dock for the whole summer.

So it’s time for the summer and some new possibilities. Who knows where I’ll end up.

Comment from: MIchael Greaney [Visitor]

Tony,
We’ll be in FLA in August and again in November. Drop me a line and let me know when you’ll be there.
Later Dude,
Mike G

2005-05-22 @ 01:38

So, things have been slow and quiet onboard Andiamo lately, accented by breakneck fast moments of insanity (more on that later). Miet and Linda went back to Guatemala about a couple of weeks ago after a week’s stay onboard that went by in the blink of an eye. They got their PADI certs, so they’re happy, but I think they would have liked to stay a little longer. It was nice having them onboard. I’ll probably run into them once more when I get back to Rio Dulce. I’ve been waiting on my replacement main for going on almost one month now. Honduran customs and DHL have made the whole process of me getting my sail an absolute pain in the ass. This kind of incompetence makes it pretty easy to see why things work the way they do in banana republics like Honduras. It’s a shame too. Because countries like these have all the tools and the makings to be efficient and prosperous. But the culture at all levels of government and bureaucracy are such that progress, if any exists, is painfully slow and torturous. It just doesn’t matter to them to make things better and easier.

The worst part is that had I contacted La Ceiba shipyard FIRST, they would have instructed me on the right way to get something shipped to them, and I would have had it by now duty free and for far less shipping cost than what I paid DHL. Instead, I just assumed that DHL knew what needed to be done, and well, here I am, still with no main. Talk about expensive lessons.

Andiamo is now in the La Ceiba Shipyard, getting some bottom paint work done as well as some repairs on my rudder, thanks to Roatan’s horrendous reef at Big Bight. I wasn’t going to get the bottom painting done until after the summer, but the rudder repair pushed that schedule up by a few months. I also managed to get a good paint guy to do a once over on my topside hull paint, which had come to get pretty banged up since leaving Mexico, for a VERY reasonable cost. Hopefully all the work will be done by Wednesday of this coming week, and I hope to have my main before I leave, if there is any kind of a god.

I chose to spare the cats of the horrific concept of getting their home pulled out of the water and having guys bang around it all day. So they have been duly “interned” at a friend’s house on Utila while the tasks at hand are completed. I’m sure they are enjoying their shore time. I checked on them yesterday when I went to Utila for Monica’s (one of the owners of Tranquila) birthday. They’re doing fine, much to my relief.

In other news, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks on Utila working on the boat, and getting my advanced open water cert. This meant doing a wreck dive, a night dive, a deep dive to 100 feet, and a couple other specialized dives.

The wreck dive was at the site of the Halliburton. A pretty big oil freighter that was purposely sunk just outside of Utila’s East End to create an artificial reef, and a dive site. It’s only been in the water about 7 years, and the reef growth on the ship in that relatively short time was pretty surprising. The night dive was out by Pigeon Cay, where we went in with dive lights, and saw some pretty amazing sea life that you just don’t get to see during the day. Then we killed the lights while we kneeled on the sandy bottom, and watched as the bioluminescence from millions of small fish and plankton permeated the water around us. It was really something, and made me want to do lots more of night diving. I actually did some night diving back in the Virgin Islands about 15 years ago, but I had forgotten how incredibly awesome it is.

So now for the aforementioned freakish moment. The last night before Miet and Linda were supposed to leave Utila, I had one of the freakiest, scariest experiences ever. Here’s the story:

I was up at Tony P’s house (who’s been in Texas), using his dsl connection to get some updates done on my laptop, which had recently crashed. It took much longer than I would have liked, and it ran me late. I was supposed to meet up with Miet and Linda to get them back to the boat so they can get ready for a dinner engagement. But I knew that Miet knew where the dinghy was, and if necessary they can get to the boat on their own, and just come back with it.

I headed down to Tranquila when I was done, expecting that Miet and Linda were going to be coming back from going to the boat to change for the dinner they were going to. They did show up, and I jumped in the dinghy to go shower and change. I was going to play some poker with a few other fellow regular players at Tranquila in about a half hour. So I dinghied out to the boat by myself, did my thing, and got back in the dinghy to head back to shore. After I left the boat, I was dinghying back to Tranquila at full speed when one of the motor’s mounts slipped off the transom board. I saw afterward that a huge chunk of wood peeled off the transom board, right underneath where one of the outboard’s mounting bolts was.

Anyway, the motor then suddenly pivoted to one side, because the other mount bolt was still holding it. And then that bolt came loose and the damn thing shot up RIGHT INTO THE AIR!!! STILL RUNNING!!!

I’m watching the motor fly in the air for what seemed like forever, and the fuel line connecting it to the tank pulled on it like a bungee cord and brought it back down to the water head first! I instinctively wanted to grab it to keep it from sinking, but it was upside down, and the motor was still RUNNING! So the prop was spinning like crazy. The motor went straight down into the water and down, down, down.

I realized after everything was over, which only took about five seconds total, that the shaft and the prop passed my head by a matter of about 8 inches on its way back down from space. Amazingly, the spinning prop touched nothing on me or the dinghy, whose respective soft tissue, semi-hard skull and inflatable bladders would have been no match for a spinning propeller. Count it as freakishly good luck.

Anyway, I’m now dazed and stunned at what just happened. It was nighttime, so of course there was no way I could go after it. So I paddled in to Tranquila with the one good oar I have on the dinghy, wet and pretty shook up. Some of my diver friends said that they would come and help me find it the next morning, and provide me with some lift bags to see if we can float it up to the top. I tried to chill out, but I was pretty freaked out the whole night at what happened.

I woke up quite early the next morning, didn’t get much sleep anyway. The water was perfectly still, no wind or current. So I got in the dinghy, rowed around where I thought the thing came off, and found it within 45 minutes or so, laying on one side, with the word “Tohatsu” blaring out at me. I dove in with a line, tied it to the outboard and pulled it back up myself. I brought it back to the boat, and put it on the motor mount with the help of Marcos, a fellow cruiser. I then washed it off with fresh water and lubricated it everywhere I can. I cleaned off all the electrical contacts I can find too. I was not sure if the thing would ever start again. But after some serious pulling to clear the valves of salt water and god knows what else, it STARTED! It ran rough for about 5 minutes or so, and then it started running normally again like nothing ever happened. I put it back on the dinghy, and rode it around for several minutes, and it purred like a kitten. Unbelievable. I hope it just keeps on running now.

So as of now, the boat sits in the yard at La Ceiba, I continue to wait for my main (which I should have by Monday now, but who knows) and hope that the work gets done on Andiamo by Wednesday or so of this week. In the meantime, I think I’ll take a couple of side trips up to Copan and San Pedro Sula so I can check out some other parts of Honduras.

Oh, and I’ll get the rest of my restored postings and pics back up here during this downtime.