We are still in town at Rio Dulce. We have been waiting for good weather to venture out to the sea. Waiting and waiting. Since we have had to wait the entire last week we now have less than two weeks to sail in the ocean, before Steve and June fly back home on February 22. The weather on the ocean has been high wind, big waves, and rain..... not very inviting or comfortable for sailing. The weather hasn't been great here, inland, either. There have been a handful of cloudy/rainy days and many mostly cloudy days. Our tans are pretty limited, but at least we are not burning and it's not too hot.
Our waiting time has been put to good use, fixing small things on the boat, which will make sailing life easier (whenever we finally get sailing). Also, our excursion to Finca Paraiso was an excellent learning and practice opportunity for our novice sailing, plus we enjoyed our hours in the hot waterfall!
The last few days have been spent doing more small boat projects, shopping for fresh fruits and veggies, and we even got in some reading (of course some of the reading was about boat mechanics, sailing safety techniques, and route planning for Roatan, Honduras).
June has been very, very helpful with boat living (cooking, cleaning, shopping, organizing and storing things, boat projects, etc.). Steve has been guiding many of the boat repair projects that Brian and Daniel have been doing and he has been getting lots of advise from other sailors about where to go sailing and what waypoints to use. Also, Steve gave us two excellent days of sailing lessons this past week, when we sailed to Finca Paraiso (the hot waterfall). Daniel and Brian have been busy doing boat projects; fixing or installing this or that. Mom and I have been helping June with the boat living activities, plus getting all of the boat papers in line for our Guatemala check out.
While we were on anchor at Finca Paraiso last week, we had our boat renaming ceremony. Mom and dad wanted to rename the boat when they bought her, however it took several months to decide on their favorite name. The name “Kwiana” (which means ‘thank you’ in the Yupik language of northwest Alaska and is usually spelled ‘quyana’) was chosen by my parents in the summer of 2008, however the U.S. Coast Guard had to approve the name before the letters could be changed on her hull. On Wednesday night mom led the renaming ceremony, which involves champagne (or the closest thing to champagne you can buy) and a speech about the safety and gratitude the boat provided with its old name, and will provide with its new name. Then everyone drinks to the history of the boat and the future of the boat. Mom did a great job leading the ceremony and the new letters look great on her stern:
Kwiana
Sutton, AK
We may head out of town today, and head down river to a marina near the mouth of the river. Then Monday or Tuesday (depending on the ocean conditions) we will check out of Guatemala at Livingston and sail toward Roatan, Honduras. I think it may require an overnight sail to get to Roatan, which may be a challenging adventure for us novice sailors. We intend to sail around Roatan for as much time as possible and then sail back to Livingston, Guatemala and leave the boat in Rio Dulce again. There just isn’t enough time left for sailing to consider going to Panama on this trip.
We’ll let you know how the travels go, when we get an internet connection again.
