The Vilisar Times

The life and times of Ronald and Kathleen and our voyages aboard S/V Vilisar, a 34.5-foot wooden Wm-Atkin-designed sailing cutter launched in Victoria, BC, Canada, in 1974. Since we moved aboard in 2001 Vilisar has been to Alaska, British Columbia, California, Mexico, The Galapagos and mainland Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

BAHIA DE CARÁQUEZ
Bahia de Caráquez, Ecuador, Saturday, May 27, 2006


Strange to stick your head out of a window or door of your house and find that you are in South America! The tide is well up this morning but ebbing now rapidly and the lagoon, with a layer of light mist, seems huge off to the east. Fishermen is dugout canoes are sprinkled around especially over toward the sand bar where the current is perhaps not so fast. The shore of the town is about 500 yards away, close enough to see a lot of detail but far enough away to have our privacy and to prevent the traffic noises around the bus terminal and along the road running out of town from disturbing us. In fact, there is not much traffic at all. I turn back to start making coffee.

In the cabin belowdecks, everything is damp and salty after days and weeks at sea with blowing salt-spray. The forecastle stowage was not ideal and books and various others small items that are kept in place by a fishnet wall have all slid to port and are all at sixes and sevens. The settee covers, the bedding and all our clothing feel clammy. Dried salt is caked all round the skylight, attracting moisture in the night, and now dripping occasionally into the cabin. Around the companionway hatch water glistens. The pots and kettle on the galley stove are grey with salt. We feel salty and dirty and tired.

We had the anchor down about mid-afternoon yesterday off the town of Bahia de Caráquez in the huge sheltered harbour amidst a collection of other cruising boats, perhaps a bit over two dozen altogether. There is one Danish flag but otherwise all the boats here are American or Canadian. Whereas the Europeans we ran into in The Galapagos were all somewhat circumspect about approaching other boats, we are already getting regular visits from other boaters. David, for example, comes over in an inflatable dinghy to brief us on what to expect here from the Port Captain. He tells us about local services and Puerto Amistad.

We start cleaning up, stripping off bedding and gathering up items to send to the laundry over the next few days. In next to no time we have two stinking duffel bags filled and set out in the cockpit to be picked up. By some sort of miracle the propane tank has waited until we arrived before running out. As every cruiser can tell you, propane tanks normally run out during the preparation of a meal. We expect that. But we also know they are devilish enough to run out just at dusk, when a big sea is running and/or a rain squall is just beginning. Kathleen goes out with the 7/8th inch open-ended wrench and switches the tanks, setting the empty aside to be refilled.

Going ashore will require careful timing. In mid-ebb the current runs at about 4 knots. This will whisk us smartly along to the little floating dinghy dock provided by Puerto Amistad. The tide will reach high around 1400 and we plan to go ashore. For one thing we have to check in at the Capitania de Puerto. And we need to get some money from an ATM somewhere. Prior to that we have to visit an internet café, let our friends and family know that we have arrived safely, assess if there is any money on one of our accounts so we can pay our harbour and country entrance fees.

We visit Tripp, the owner of Puerto Amistad. He is an old-hand at cruising. But now he has “swallowed the anchor”, married a Columbian lady and bought the restaurant and mooring buoys. He focuses his business at cruisers, and provides a number of useful services for them: not just the mooring buoys, but laundry, book exchange, boat minding services and a whole network of contacts around Bahia de Caráquez. He spends about three hours of his time with us and we enjoy a very friendly reception and exchange of ideas.

Over the next few days we begin to recover our spirits after the voyage. We are still both a bone-weary and do some extra sleeping. But Kathleen has picked up some proofreading jobs so she is busy. I have lots of jobs to do on the boat but am a little slow getting started at them. Riding the ebb and floodtides means that, once we go ashore, the day is broken up and we will be gone for at least six hours. The tide runs too strongly to bother rowing against it.

Bahia de Caráquez

Bahia de Caráquez is a beach town with a row of modern, five-to-seven story apartment blocks on the point that we came around to get into the harbour. On the “outside” facing west is the Pacific. There are plenty of sandy shoals even out as far a nearly a mile, and you can see the waves breaking over them. These shoals are deposits of the silt brought down from the Andes by the Rio Chone. On the east side of the point, i.e. the inside of the lagoon, is another sandy beach. The “old town” in tucked farther back from the point, the point itself is occupied by a dozen streets of apartment blocks or small villas. Across the huge lagoon of the Rio Chone is San Vicente; water-taxis and car ferries --war-surplus, self-propelled tank-landing barges, by the looks of them -- ply back and forth at regular intervals.

The town has what in Mexico would be called perhaps a “colonial” look and feel about it. Kathleen thinks it looks “European”. The streets are laid out in a grid. There is very little vehicular traffic but lots of pedo-cabs (aka “eco-taxis”), which carry everything from passengers to freight around town. What motorised traffic there is consists mainly of small stake trucks. For walkers the pavements are generally in good condition (unlike, say, northern Mexico where you either fell into holes in the sidewalks while trying to avoid the head-level air-conditioning units or you cracked you skull while trying not to stumble into the mantraps in the pavement). The pedestrian sidewalks frequently have veranda rooves over them. The commercial streets are a myriad of very small shops, some basically no bigger than a closet with its front open to the street; there are no supermarkets, no big-box stores: all the shopping is still in the town centre and still in the “mom-and-pop shop” stage. There is no wandering the aisles and making your own selection; you ask the store clerk who might be behind a counter while you might still actually be standing on the sidewalk leaning in or who might be standing on the sidewalk with you. If inside the shop, you pay the shop owner who might be sitting at a desk handling the cash. Unlike those huge impersonal emporiums we are used to back home, where the only word you might exchange during your whole stay in the supermarket is likely to be only a routine “goodmorninghowareyou” with the checkout lady. Here, therefore, you still get to deal with real people. If your Spanish is weak you do a lot of gesticulating and struggling to make your needs known. It’s an adventure. The disadvantage is the time it takes and the occasional frustration. But, we have lots of the former and we can usually deal patiently with the latter.

There are no cash registers, for the most part. The Ecuadorian currency is no longer the sucre but the US dollar: the economy was “dollarised” after the sucre collapse in the 1990’s. Older Ecuadorian coins are still in circulation but simply assigned a US-dollar value (fifty centavos = 50¢). Change for your purchase is made from a drawer or a wooden box. Small change is hard to come by and, if you present a bill that is much larger than the purchase, the shop-keeper may have to dash to the neighbours, or even cancel the transaction because he cannot make change. In one case I just had pulled money from the ATM in tens and twenties and gone on to the auto-parts store for a metre of electrical wire to repair the solar panel. The transaction was worth, as it turned out, about 30¢. When I waved a US$ 10-bill the owner just laughed and said, “Pay me the next time you come in.”

There are a few modern administrative buildings owned by banks and the “canton” administration. But most of the building are non-descript or quasi-colonial. In many buildings the upper stories are sided in sheet metal or even, as in the case of one building we saw in the town that needed a little work, sticks and wattle. The well-kept, medium-large church is 19th century “gothic” and looks down at a square that slopes gently down toward the water a block or so away. Like most buildings here, the church’s roof is of corrugated iron. Unlike most other buildings, however, the church’s roof is robins-egg blue. Although it is has doors and traditional stained-glass windows, the doors and windows are set into the walls so that the balmy breezes are always free to blow through the church itself.

There is of course a mercado. The big day, we are told, is Saturday when fresh produce arrives, though when we visited it on Saturday morning there was so much by way of fresh fruit and vegetables one could hardly believe this is all just put out for one day. It is getting on toward month-end and we are as usual running out of cash and praying that the translation agencies will pay us a little more rapidly. The produce is cheap and we spend five dollars on broccoli, blackberries, mandarin oranges and bread.

The mercado, like the town, is smaller and quieter than anything we encountered in Mexico. Perhaps San Vicente across the water is different. But here, there is a certain general lifelessness. Bahia de Caráquez is by no means as bustling or busy as a Mexican town. Any Mexican town. There is a general quiet, even backwater feel about the place. Partly, I am sure, this has to do with the fact this is a vacation town for wealthy Ecuadorians. Many of the houses and apartments are in fact unused for most of the year. There is just not the press of people and trafico, the general hustle and bustle that you find in Mexico. Perhaps too we are used to the flashy look of towns with neon signs and bright lights; there is almost none of that here. The signs above the shops are painted and generally not even illuminated at night. After dark the streets are darker though there are lots of people about since this is Latin America and since it gets dark at about 1800.

Part of the low energy level here has perhaps also to do with other and bigger factors. At one time Bahia de Caráquez had an important shrimp-farming industry. It was totally blighted by a crustacean virus in the late seventies or early eighties. There is no sign of any fish farming that we can see. An El-Niño year occurred in 1997/98; it rained almost without interruption for six months, the river swelled with silt, muck and sewage that ran like a torrent through the town wreaking untold damage to its infrastructure. Then, the following year, there was a 7.2 earthquake. It was several years before the water and sewer systems could be rebuilt: the population had to be provided with water by tank trucks. You can see the damage still. There are some high rises, for example, that are skeletons, i.e. no windows or doors, probably so damaged that they are beyond repair and nobody is prepared to spend the money to pull them down. I saw some villas near the beach that had serious vertical cracks and were essentially vacant. They were padlocked and boarded up. Here and there you see damage to the facades of downtown buildings and you wonder if perhaps it was caused by the earthquake.

Taken altogether, these three events have nearly spelled the ruin of Bahia de Caráquez. It is only now getting somewhat back on its feet.

The cruisers who have been here speak highly of the town and the people though I cannot say to what degree they actually know local people. Certainly Tripp, the owner-manager of Puerta Amistad, an ex-cruiser himself, is extremely warm, charming and friendly, and pays good attention to the boaters. He is plugged in locally and speaks Spanish fluently. His business, surely, cannot survive on us boaters alone, many of us shoestring cruisers, after all. But he is a warm and welcoming interface to the community and, in the evening, we see local people at his pier-restaurant. For us the big draw is the community-centre aspect of Puerto Amistad and the really great hot showers, laundry and other facilities.

TIDAL GRID, IMMIGRATION CHECK-IN
Bahia de Caráquez, Sunday, 28 May 2006


Vilisar badly needs her hull painted with anti-fouling paint, her sacrificial zincs renewed, any damage sustained in backing over rocks up in Mexico repaired and the topsides painted. The nearest haulout facilities (with a travel lift or a marine railway), however, are in Salinas, about 200 miles away. There they might be cheaper than San Carlos, Sonora, but we are still talking about several hundred dollars. On top of this comes the cost of bottom paint, which if you get Hempel-brand ablative or some other international brand will run about $135 and upwards a gallon (4 litres). We need about three gallons to put on two coats.

Jack and Monica aboard the Comox-based junk Bella Via, whom we met in La Paz and later in Barre de Navidad, Mexico, recommended using Mexican bottom paint and porch-enamel for the topsides. Jack has worked on boats all up and down the British-Columbia coast so he has some insight into these things. I followed his advice when painting Vilisar’s decks while in Barre and am glad I did. The enamel I bought from Comex (an Akzo Nobel subsidiary from Holland) was better and cheaper than the ACE Hardware paint I had used before.

I popped into a local paint store here and found that they carry a local brand of anti-fouling bottom paint at about $40 a (4-liter) gallon. I am sure they will have white porch paint of acceptable quality as well so I shall not have to go shopping in Manta or Salinas.

Tripp told us that he knows that boats have used the cement wall at the yacht club as a tidal grid. We would need to get permission from the club. They also have water and electricity there. Tripp knows of a man, a painting contractor, who can organise the work at about $10 a day per man. Yesterday’s high tide at mid-day was 2.9 metres, and 3 metre tides are not unusual. We actually saw an old wooden motoroboat cum tug being careened on the beach near Puerto Amistad. We checked the site at the Yacht-club out yesterday at both low tide and high, and we shall certainly be able to use it. We cannot get ready in time for this month (the tidal differences begin to decline now until next month) but we shall scan the calendar and tide schedules and pick another day.

While Kathleen rows ashore this morning to deliver her proofreading job to the internet café, I stay aboard to work on little jobs. I recover the corroded and broken bobstay chain. The lower links had corroded to half the thickness of the links that were out of the water. I have already checked out the possibility of buying the same type of chain at a local hardware store, but I think I shall simply use the spare anchor chain I am carrying around in the bilge. It is good quality though the links are a little smaller. There is plenty there so I can replace the boomkin shrouds as well. A stitch in time!

Then I wire up the second solar panel where the wire had ripped out. I am no great shakes at electricity, but I think I get it right. A problem here in Bahia de Caráquez is getting enough sunlight to allow the solar panels to charge the batteries. There is no loss of effectiveness here due to tropical heat. But the skies are cloudy for much of the time and this definitely cuts solar-energy collecting efforts. I hope we don’t have to start running the engine alternator to produce power. At least we don’t have a fridge or freezer to worry about; they take lots of power. But we do want to be able to charge the laptop on board and not have to risk water damage by carrying it ashore to charge it.

Then I spent an hour unpacking the bags of clean laundry and putting things away before sitting down to write. I hear Kathleen coming alongside in the dinghy. Time to stop.

Astrid

Last week an old colleague and friend from Frankfurt passed away after a long fight with cancer. When we both started working at the same time at Citibank in Frankfurt back about 1973, Astrid had moved down from Hamburg and I from Stuttgart. She was a typical “Hanseata”, perhaps a bit distant and correct, but reliable as an atomic clock, ready for an earthy laugh and interested in so many things. It is hard to believe she is gone. Her friends will miss her. My thoughts go out to Norbert, her husband.

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be too late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.


- Christina Georgina Rossetti

CAPITANIA DE PUERTO
Monday, 29 May 2006

On the afternoon we arrived, i.e. last Wednesday, we were inspected by a petty officer from the Armada del Ecuador, Capitania de Puerta and told that we should come into the office to check in officially the next day. We had to go looking for money and were too late to visit them before the holiday weekend (Friday was Ecuadorian Independence Day). So, we go in today.

There had been some puzzlement that we arrived in Ecuador without a Zarpe, i.e. an exit certificate from somewhere and they seemed to be scratching their heads when I said that Canadian vessels leaving Canada do not get Zarpes. Nor did we have one from the U.S.A. We thought we might get a bit of flak for this but when we finally got to the Capitania de Puerto office, which is just opposite the anchorage, they filled out the papers and gave us our entry certificates. We paid a total of $23 of which $10 was for arrival processing, $6 anchoring and the remainder for something else. On Wednesday, we are sharing a taxi to Manta to visit Migración for our immigration visas.

Tuesday, 30 May 2006

This morning, Kathleen more-or-less finishes the thankless job of cleaning and re-stowing the forecastle so that it is dry and roomy enough for us both to sleep up there again. She had completely re-arranged it for offshore voyaging- making the parachute anchor and storm sails more easily reachable, for example. With William and Antonia arriving from the U.S.A. in about ten days (we pick them up in Quito), we need to free up berths.

Meanwhile, I get into the dinghy and address the issue of the broken bobstay. I tie the dinghy to the anchor chain while the current presses the dinghy again Vilisar’s bows. Using tools, I remove the turnbuckle dangling lifelessly from the bowsprit, being careful not to drop the bolt into the water. Unfortunately, I cannot loosen the bolt on the bracket at water level while the current is running so strongly. Back on deck, I lay out all the bits and pieces and prepare to cut a piece of chain and fit the ends with shackles to be installed with the current is not so strong.

Our major job ashore today is to get set up with a cellphone. Leslie and Philip from S/V Carina told us they got a sim-card for their existing phone for only $8. I think they use prepaid cards. With the phones here, we don’t pay for incoming calls as one does in the U.S.A. And, of course, there is always the text messenging facility. This should make it easier to get translating business now.

While I am writing this blog, we hear a commotion on deck. I rush out to find a fish has leaped unto our deck and is flopping around wildly. I suspect this is a “cavina” but am not sure. He’s about 12-15 inches long and scaley. They were selling cavina at the mercado on Saturday. Will have to get some advice about its edibility.

Now this is my kind of hunting and gathering!

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