the old man and the sea

tuesday april 14 onwards
we spent a few days recovering from the road trip, and doing washing and sampling the new various different coffee beans we had bought along the way in the new coffee press. we looked at the atlas and i learnt there are 82 million people in vietnam, which is a hell of a lot. i rode my bike a little bit. on the friday we went off on a flight to san pedro on ambergris caye to visit john mcafee for the weekend, which i wrote about already – i went jet ski-ing, we ate really nice food at the restaurant next door, the dog got ill and its nose bled everywhere, i asked john if he’d read all the books that adorn his house (he said most of them). john’s cousins were staying with him, one was called darrell and he had been living in nicaragua for a few years and had made a newspaper there, and he told me about nicaraguan politics. his other cousin was called suzi and lived in india and she was interested in hypnosis and was going to learn to hypnotise herself. i didn’t know before but john is actually half english, the other half is american, but he now has belizean citizenship too. anyway bert took a few people flying and made a few bob out of that which was nice and i bought a new bikini with it. we learnt there had been some murders recently on the north of the island related to drugs. we heard that as part of the drug route from south and central america to north america, the sea off this island (which is just below mexico) is littered with un-collected bags of cocaine, or bags of money gone astray, and that there is a separate drug trade going on in these unofficial bags of drugs. like if you found one and you knew the people to contact you could sell it on for a nice bit of pocket money, or you could try selling it to tourists etc, but you are basically playing with fire, as there are various gangs who patrol the reef and sea picking up the bags and basically have a monopoly on profiting from what is dropped there due to being violent and scary. this was what the murders were related to, some local fishermen getting on the wrong side of the gangs. flying over the sea we did see lots of square white shapes in the water, and after a while realized that they must be bags of cocaine, and having seen them, quickly looked away and pretended we hadn’t seen them as it is all just too scary and dangerous.

monday april 20
from san pedro we flew down the coast to placencia in the south of belize to see denis, an old friend of bert’s from montana who he happened to bump into when he was last in placencia. they were hang glider pilots back in the good old days when hang gliding was just starting. early hang gliders were basically swing seats suspended from a big kite, they look hilarious in the photos i’ve seen. before knowing all this, i said were you a hang glider too denis? he said don’t be ridiculous, i was a hang glider pilot, a hang glider is the machine you fly in, not the person that does the flying, that is the pilot, good god why can nobody get things right anymore. i thought gosh someone who is as pedantic as me. he is cool though and has long white hair and looks like he’s been at sea for a long time (he has), and knows loads of things about different places on earth and islands i’ve never heard of and wars that have happened, and how all the colonies that the english own or owned are nowhere near as nice or organized as ones that belong to the french or dutch for example. him and bert, the americans, enjoyed outnumbering me, the english person, and telling me how stupid all the english pronunciations and words for things are. obviously i vehemently disagreed and defended my lexical honour accordingly – like how dumb that they should call a pavement a sidewalk – they need everything spelling right out for them, it is at the side and you walk on it, so let’s call it a sidewalk. surprising they don’t call a road a middledrive by that rationale. and why call jam jelly? or a bum bag a fanny pack? anyway, denis now mainly sails around on his nice sailboat, and he was planning on leaving in the next few weeks to sail down to cartagena in columbia, via the leeward islands (i think that’s right, basically via all the caribbean islands that go down to columbia, and also there are lots around venezuela). i renamed denis captain bird’s eye like on the fish finger boxes.

so we stayed with denis on the boat for a few nights. previous to these few days i knew absolutely nothing about sailing, possibly even minus nothing if that is possible. after a few hours on the boat i had learnt the sailing names for things – like the bedrooms aren’t called front or back bedrooms, but aft and foreward cabins; right and left is starboard and port; closing the windows is called battening down the hatches; a toilet is a head; a rope is a line or a howyerd or a sheet; something else is an arched davet, there is a bimini, a soft dodger, a jib sail and so on and so on. all very strange and foreign to me, and very interesting. there was no walking the plank or pirate raids. denis obviously was the captain, bert was first mate, and i was either second mate or galley slave (what an affront). being on the boat reminded me of when i was little and we used to go on camping holidays, and everything was neatly stashed away in cupboards that have secure popper type opening and closing mechanisms, and everything has to be stowed away neatly in its proper place when you are on the move so it doesn’t fall out or tip over or create mayhem in other ways. after one night in the harbor we drew up the anchor (which creeped me out as it was all covered in mud and dirt and imagining the bottom of the deep sea always creeps me out) and set sail out to one of the cayes which their friend kerry rogers owns. kerry rogers invented internet gambling and is very very rich. his island is called mosquito caye, and it was hit by a hurricane about a year after he bought it, and the house there was destroyed and the palm trees were all ripped out of the ground. what a bummer, but it’s the risk you take when you own a caribbean island i guess. we sailed off with the engine going for a while, then you put the sails up once you’re a certain distance from land. i don’t understand how the sails and the wind and the rudder and the steering work, but that doesn’t matter really, they did work which is the main thing. i had tons of questions for denis – what is a keel, what keeps a boat in the water and makes it not sink, what if you run aground, can it tip up, what happens if it does, why is a caye called a caye, why is it called a jib sail, why does the jib sail roll up on to the mast but the main sail you unfurl it and pull it up to the top with ropes and pulleys, what happens if the gps breaks, do you have an alarm bell which means a coastguard will find you if there’s a problem, what is the sail made of, is it mandatory to fly a belize flag when in belize waters (yes it’s sailing etiquette), where did you get your belize flag, do you have a honduras flag too, ….. after a while he probably wished he had put a plank there and forced me to walk it into some shark infested waters. my question that caused most amusement was what happens at night if you are sailing a long way and you are far from land, do you just drop the anchor in the middle of the sea and all go to sleep? i think this is a valid question for a novice sailor. apparently no, you carry on sailing all night, in shifts. like ellen mcarthur must have done round the world on her own, jesus that would be such hard work and you would go mad. there is a disease that sailors get that have been at sea for ages, which is that they hallucinate that the waves waving are sheaves of grass blowing in a field and they just step off the boat, believing they are back on land. they die. this is mentioned in the rime of the ancient mariner, i can’t remember the name for it. as an aside did you know that a marine, ie an american soldier, is actually a foot soldier not somebody who goes on a boat.

we sailed for a few hours which was pretty exciting, the boat tips right up so you’re nearly touching the water, this is called healing over, not tipping over. denis shouted commands relating to undoing or doing up certain ropes that controlled the sails. i kept the place ship shape and tidied up the ropes after we’d used them, and sat on deck reading and watching the sea and the horizon and wondered what was in the water underneath us and how deep it was. we got to kerry’s island and docked, kerry wasn’t there but his workers were so they helped us. we snorkeled around for a bit and found some really big starfishes one of which bert took out of the water and we put on the island to look at later, but then forgot about until the next day by which time it had deflated and its legs had gone all bent and deformed and i felt really bad especially when denis called us starfish killers. we put the starfish back in the water and hopefully it revived it, it’s fairly hard to tell whether a starfish is alive or dead as they don’t do anything other than lie there in the shape of a star. we cooked some dinner on the boat – denis had lots of surprisingly tasty packaged food like potato from a box, and a cheesecake you make from a box by adding water/milk/butter to various sachets of powdered things. the workers brought us fry jacks for breakfast which were really tasty, they are kind of puffed up doughy things and you can put butter and honey on them or beans and cheese etc. we dove in from the boat and stood on the front bit of it (i can’t be bothered now using the correct sailing terms, i guess this would be something like the bow or the hull or the aft foreground deck area), like they do in titanic. incidentally bert recently took someone flying who is a caribbean island broker and had sold an island to leonardo dicaprio, just behind ambergris caye the one where the cocaine bags are.

being on the boat made me really really tired, we tried to watch a dvd in the evening but i couldn’t stay awake, it must be the wavy motion of it perhaps. we sailed back to the mainland after 2 days at the island. the gps system had stopped working for some reason so it was a bit stressful, you have to be really careful going near the cayes as the water is so much shallower there – luckily the depth reader was still working. a whole school of dolphins came and swam around the boat which was amazing as i’ve never seen dolphins in real life, they go really fast it’s amazing they never crash into each other as they weave around and under the boat, sometimes they swim on their backs and you see their tummys. they stayed a while but as suddenly as they had appeared they disappeared which made me sad. i wondered howcome god or whoever it was that designed dolphins, made them live in the sea but have to breathe air not water. perhaps he got in a muddle. we got back to shore and anchored and went ashore in the little dinghy that hangs off the end of the boat. we rushed to get the ultralight all packed up and ready to go before the clouds came and got us, and we told denis we’d hopefully be back for his trip down to venezuela – which unfortunately we had to decide against due to having no money and having to knuckle down and be realistic and sort out the work permit and get the business off the ground (ha ha pardon the pun). this was definitely the right decision, but how boring to have to do that instead of a caribbean island sailing trip… sigh… my life is so hard…

we managed to set off from placencia before the winds got us, and were off back to cayo. we had to fly at 7500 feet, right above the clouds, where it was cold and beautiful, you are right there amongst the huge fluffy cumulo nimbus clouds, you can’t see the ground, you can just see clouds all around you. you don’t actually fly inside them as you wouldn’t be able to so bert was always on the lookout for how to fly around them and sometimes we had to go even higher to go over them. it’s kind of mind blowing, both scary and amazing at the same time. i asked bert what would happen if a plane was up there too, he said what do you mean what if there’s a plane – well, what if there’s a plane – so what if there is – well what if it flies right into us through a cloud – well of course it won’t we’ll see it first won’t we – i don’t know – well don’t be so silly of course we will, jeez will you please just let me fly and stop asking me questions. i had told bert on a previous flight that from now on i wanted him to inform me every time he was about to do something like change altitude or speed, but he was disobeying orders and was just flying without telling me what he was doing. this was because on our flight from cayo to san pedro on ambergris caye we had flown over the sea (obviously) and suddenly right when we were about halfway from the mainland to san pedro bert abruptly turns round and starts looking at the propeller/engine area at the back of the plane and his foot came off the accelerator pedal, so we suddenly were going really slowly. i screamed what the hell is happening help help – nothing honey – help help what are you doing robert we’re right in the middle of the sea – nothing i’m just checking the fuel – what the hell do you mean just checking the fuel what do you mean is there a problem with the fuel what will we do we’re in the middle of the sea help help why are we going so slowly all of a sudden – nothing is wrong calm down and shush – help help what’s happening – well we’re flying into a headwind and i’m checking that we have enough fuel to get us to san pedro but we might have to go back to belize city and refuel – what help help how will we have enough to get back to the mainland though help help – well honey we’ll be going downwind so of course we’ll have enough to get back – oh god we’re going to die aren’t we – please shush and let me fly my aeroplane lucy. anyway we did have enough fuel but still refueled on caye caulker to be on the safe side.