Onward...

The bureaucracy and paperwork for a yacht to enter and exit Belize is THE worst of all the countries i visited this year. One has to satisfy 5 different departments, all of whom come aboard. The more departments there are, the more costly entry and exit becomes. Luckily i have a printer/copier aboard and could make the many copies required on demand: don’t know how one could run the Belizean gauntlet without it. It’s almost like the Belize government discourages cruising here. I guess there is not much money in it for them. Another example is their policy that if you run your yacht onto a reef and the reef doesn’t claim your yacht…the government seizes it. This policy is supposedly about protecting their reefs. Fiercely. Apparently they’ll sell your yacht back to you for triple its value. Clearly their priority is to take care of and entice the cruise ships here, business which must be far more profitable.

But Belize’s cruise ship industry is horribly and short sightedly structured to exclude almost all Belizeans. The cruise ship gringos are shuttled to and from tour boats and busses and gated shopping areas…all of which have to kick back half of their gross income to the cruise line. Imagine being on the outside of that tantalizing flow of money, watching it busily conducted just beyond your reach while you and your loved ones struggle and starve. There is very little benefit, maybe the smallest trickle down, to 99% of the Belizean people. I, for one, would get angry. Small wonder we were told not to walk the streets after dark. But the real crime is NOT the one we were warned away from, it is the way the cruise ship industry is structured. The crime, once again, is the we/they ethic. As if we are not all in this together. I have never been attracted to try a cruise ship cruise anyway. I hope its entire industry is not structured like this. If i were attracted and if it is all like this…my conscience would not allow me to go.

The day after the storm much of Belize had no electricity. I called the three departments we needed clearance from to leave Belize. None of them answered. Sean and i spent the day undoing our storm preparations. Re-installing the solar panels. Hoisting and rolling up the genoa. Stowing the extra lines. Squaring Akimbo away, making her ready to sail. Grant, the owner of the boat tied up ahead of us, was grateful to find his boat afloat. He thanked us for what little care we had given to it. In return he gave us a ride to a grocery store so we could get our provisioning out of the way. I made a celebratory dinner that evening of lobster and veggies on pasta, opened a good bottle of wine and toasted Sean’s good help, without which Akimbo and i would have suffered far more. Thank you again, Sean. And again. As i lay down that night i was asleep before my head reached my pillow.

The next day we decided to go to the nearby customs and immigration offices in person and hoped to avoid the port authority much less conveniently located downtown. After all, they had given us clearance before the storm and the operations manager had said we would only have to pay for more days in Belize if the storm didn’t hit. If the storm DID hit, she would consider it a “force majeure” and we wouldn’t have to pay more. I took that one step further to construe that she said we wouldn’t have to come in…

Errol, our cab driver, very black man, dread locks, sun glasses, tall, skinny, but forceful (very) and animated and loud, maybe in his 60s or 50s, turned out to be our hero when it came to getting clearance and out of town. Belize was part of the British empire, English is its official language…while Spanish is its “native” language (tho Mayan preceded it). Errol had lived in the U.S. for 33 years but whatever the language the dialect is thick. He dropped us off at immigration. A tall man was there, who did NOT seem like a boss, officiously wiping all the countertops with lemon pledge. He was the officer we needed, tho, to get our passports stamped. He said he needed to come with us to the boat. Okay. When we got in the cab…Errol got “on fire.” He proclaimed this had never happened before in his five years of driving cab and yatistas to and from departments. He went on and on. I asked him not to piss off the immigration officer. But by the time we got to the customs office where we would supposedly pick up a customs officer to come to the boat…the immigration man said he would see what he could do to get everything done there and then. Voila! (or maybe that's "Ole'!" in Mexico).

Errol congratulated the officer on cutting thru the bullshit and being good for Belize instead of bad for Belize. He applauded being part of the solution instead of part of the problem, on taking personal responsibility instead of blaming the system… Once we were in the cab with Errol by ourselves he repeated that he knew the officers came to the boat to check you in but had never seen them do so to check you out. It was a hustle, and he wasn’t gonna watch it happen without calling it by its proper name. We gave him $40 instead of $30 (didn’t have change anyway), thanked him. He gave us soulful handshakes, and his parting words were “love brothers love!”

We jumped on board Akimbo, started the engine and cast off. As we went by the Port Authority dock they shouted “where are you going?” I replied, “Mexico!” “Did you get clearance?” “Yes, with immigration, customs and the port authority.” Several of them were doing things in their big fast pangas, those on the deck of their out station went in. Were they calling the downtown office and finding out we hadn’t gone back? We kept going. One of their boats went by. We kept going. Maybe they weren’t coming after us after all. We motored four hours into a headwind out of the bay and past the barrier reef. Set sail and headed north. I wouldn’t really relax until we crossed the border.

We were on a windy close reach with the genoa alone. The wind was building. So before sunset we went to the jib alone and did a man overboard drill. Then we settled into our first night watches – 3 hours on and 3 hours off. This was no timid introduction for Sean. Akimbo was rockin’ and rollin’ in 20 to 30+ knots of wind. We were going fast. Between 7 and 8 knots most of the time. In the next 24 hours Akimbo set a new day’s record: 172 nautical miles! I had budgeted 3 days for this leg. But we anchored at Isla Mujeres at 4:30am on our second night out, 42 hours total. 4 hours under power at the start and 2.5 under power at the end to carefully pick our way in in the dark.

We caught some needed sleep in the morning and then radioed Marina Milagro. Yes, they had space – and we highly recommend them. Very nice folks. Theirs would be a good place to rendezvous with my sister and from which to feel like tourists. Ahhhh. But of course we needed to clean up and do a few more boat chores. Ann arrived the next day as planned, and Sean departed the morning after that. We were all sorry to part ways. I had found a fellow man-of-heart in Sean, and felt a new brotherhood.

Marina Milagro includes the use of bicycles, kayaks, masks, snorkels and fins with their moorage. This morning Ann and i enjoyed paddling out to the underwater reef park and floating thru on the current for a few hours.



With internet access now, i have been watching the weather in detail. There is another hurricane “out there.” Forecast to be a category 3. I desperately want nothing to do with it. There is a cold front coming from the NW too that should push “Tomas” north. The models are not infallible, but they ALL agree. So Ann and i and Akimbo have our weather window to head for Florida tomorrow. It appears the winds will be from the east for the first three days, so we plan to head north. At that point we will be within reach of the Florida coast if we need to run for shelter. On the fourth day the winds will probably get shifty ahead of the cold front’s arrival. On the fifth day the cold front will arrive and the winds are forecast to come on strong from the north. If we aren’t already in Clearwater…i should be able to let you know where else it is that we’ve put in. Visualize good weather, great sailing, and good luck for us. Thank you for your part in this trip too.