MORE BAD NEWS ON ECUADOR CRUISING
Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador, 30 July 2007
Further to my recent blog about the bureaucratic difficulties of sailing now to Ecuador, here are two reports by sailing friends who were caught up in the bureaucratic machinations concerning foreign boats. BTW, there is still no agent in Bahia. One German boat left after travelling by taxi to Manta and doing paperwork there. At a price, of course. Still the Port Captain here tried to keep him back.
Report 1
When we visited Ecuador and its off-lying Islas Galápagos in 2006 we were enamored with the country, its culture and its people. We enthusiastically chose to return in 2007. In the interim period many changes have occurred—that may or may not be related to a change in government—which have made Ecuador difficult and much more expensive for cruisers.
The most onerous change has been the recent order by the Admiral of the Navy that mandates that yachts are to be incorporated into a computer tracking system—Sistema de Información de Tráfico Marítimo (SITRAME) —that was designed for commercial vessels. (If you are interested in a description of the Ecuadorian system, in English, we have downloaded it to our website: www.sv-carina.org Select “Our Resources” and scroll down to Ecuador and select SITRAME to download a file in pdf format) If the system’s mandates are followed to the letter, than a sailing vessel is required to report EVERY deviation from it’s predicted rhumb line or waypoints to Ecuadorian authorities while in Ecuadorian waters. The area of jurisdiction: “will be applied in the maritime area of Ecuador responsibility, implicit toward the west until longitude 095 23 00 W, among the latitudes 01° 28' 54" N and 03° 23' 33.96" S; and, 200 NM around the Galápagos Islands…”
The managing Ecuadorian authority is called DIGMER, an acronym for Dirección General de la Marina Mercante y del Litoral (www.digmer.org, And, though the information forms are available on the internet and may be emailed to the authorities in Guayaquil, the net effect for cruisers, at this point in time, is that it has been dictated that an agent must be employed in order to process an entrada and salida (entry and exit) for a yacht for EVERY PORT visited in Ecuador. The agent fees we have knowledge of range from $150 to $200.
We entered Ecuador and were given an entrada before these changes went into effect but we will still have to pay $200 for an agent to process our zarpe from La Libertad. (Our agent: Roque Proaño Párraga, Naviera “J.C.P. Hnos.” Cia. Ltda, La Libertad. Tel. +593-4278-3931, Fax +593-4278-5317, email: navlibertjcp@hotmail.com< or navieralibertad@grupojcp.com. This agency also has offices in Guayaquil and Manta.) To obtain a zarpe, we must report our outbound rhumb line and the predicted date, time and position (latitude/longitude) when we will exit Ecuadorian waters. Alternatively, if we wished to move our vessel from Salinas up the coast into Bahía de Caráquez, we would require a domestic zarpe from Salinas ($200 in agent fees still apply) and then a new agent would take over to process our entrada (and later salida) from Bahía de Caráquez and we would be charged an agent’s fee once AGAIN.
Previously, international or domestic entradas and zarpes for yachts were handled directly by the Capitania del Puerto and the fees were reasonable—that is, on a par with other countries we’ve visited. These new agent fees, which are IN ADDITION TO all of the fees paid previously, make cruising amongst Ecuador’s anchorages and ports outrageously expensive and, as we see it, will virtually eliminate Ecuador as a cruising ground for private yachts.
To exacerbate this situation, Ecuador now has a law that extrajeros (foreigners) cannot buy fuel at subsidized prices. The law is directed at reducing the cost of the subsidies and preventing low cost fuel from illegally crossing borders into neighboring countries where it can be sold at a higher price. Unfortunately, there are no outlets or any mechanism that enables fuel to be sold at extrajero rates.
Previously, Puerto Lucia Yacht Club in La Libertad (PLYC) sold gasoline and diesel but they have eliminated this service. In addition, when we recently attempted to leave the PLYC premises with jerry jugs—and a local man—to try to purchase about 40 gallons of diesel and 5 gallons of gasoline for our passage to Costa Rica, guardia at the gate attempted to stop us from LEAVING the club and told us we could not buy fuel or bring it into the yacht club.
Even though we thought we had a good relationship with the supervisor of the guardia who was then on duty, when we questioned him as to how we would be able to buy fuel to leave the country, he first shrugged and then suggested we visit the Capitania del Puerto in Salinas to obtain written permission to buy fuel. After a 45 minute wait at the Port Captain’s office, the Capitania himself took our question and was surprised we had been sent to his office. He sent us BACK to La Libertad, this time to the Minister of Energy, who, to his credit, was able, eventually, to help us. He explained the law that diesel fuel (as an example) is subsidized and available to nationals at $1.04/gal., but the price for extrajeros was $2.50/gal. The cost for gasoline was higher. To this, we said “Bueno: donde compramos este para $2.50/gal.? (Good; where do we buy this [fuel] for $2.50?)”. He let out a large sigh and said nothing for a few seconds. He then instructed us to go to a local service station where our jerry jugs were filled with diesel and gasoline and purchased (at the national price) in the name of an Ecuadorian local we had hired. The minister met us at the service station and stamped our facturas (invoices) with an official Ministero de Energia stamp and then signed the document.
When we returned to PLYC with our fuel, the guardia at the club stopped us coming back into the gate, checked and then confiscated our facturas, which were the only proof we had that we were not breaking the law. After meeting the next day with the PLYC manager we were able to repossess our facturas. As a side note: reports from the Manta Yacht Club and Bahía de Caraquez indicate that, at least at the time of this writing, fuel can still be obtained at prices above pump prices but below the extrajero rates.
Propane is also subsidized in Ecuador. Recently the country’s supply chain was interrupted by protests and a brief embargo ensued. PLYC employees have also been instructed, by memo, not to help cruisers obtain propane. We have now been assured by Galo Ortiz, manager of PLYC, that PLYC employees will once again facilitate the purchase of propane for cruisers though we cannot be sure this is the case since the situation seems to change daily and we hear conflicting reports.
PLYC has also made other changes. In addition to a reduction in services offered, fees have continuously been increasing. An additional fee, recently initiated, is a “live aboard” fee of $200 per month for all vessels in the yard or med-moored. For our vessel the increased fee would amount to roughly a 50% increase in monthly fee. What follows is what PLYC charges (as per price increase in mid-July 2007, add 12% for IVA tax) for a typical 44’ cruising boat:
Monthly Fee (Med-moor or in yard; slips are roughly double this rate):
$484 (1ST 3 months), $460 (4th), $436 (5th), $387 (6th month and beyond)
Live Aboard Fee (in addition to Monthly Fee): $200
Electricity: $0.25/kwh
Water: $3/m3
Travelift, round trip: $ 377
Re-Blocking (using Travelift): $180
These prices were valid as of this writing. Contact: marina@puertolucia.com.ec. Note also: Galo Ortiz, Puerto Lucia’s manager will be leaving as of sometime in September 2007. We do not know yet who will replace him.
In spite of the changes in the government’s attitude and the recent exorbitant cost increases at PLYC, and at least at the time of this writing, PLYC is a good place to land if you need significant and potentially difficult repairs to your boat. However, there is no guaranty that the excellent resources in place now for such repairs will here when you arrive. (Contact Stewart Yates y Servicios email: systec@email.movistar.com.ec or tel: +593-(0)99-778-868). The 50 ton travelift operates daily and the large yard is paved and (relatively) clean. A plus for PLYC is that the security in the marina and yard is at such a high level that you can travel away from your boat to visit the spectacular and historic sights in South America secure in the knowledge of the safety of your vessel.
As an alternative, Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador with the Bahía Yacht Club, Puerto Amistad and Saiananda offers hosting services for visiting yachts at anchor or (for the latter two facilities) on moorings for $210 and $150 per month respectively, irrespective to the size of your vessel. A Naugala Yacht Services (agency) is expected to open there soon (affiliated with Puerto Amistad) and will charge and agent fee of $150 for an entrada/salida package, solving the moratorium on vessels arriving or departing from Bahía de Caráquez imposed in June by the Capitania del Puerto.
As a result of our experiences during our most recent visit, we cannot recommend Ecuador, in general, and PLYC in particular, as welcoming or economical stops for cruising yachts. We will not be returning to Ecuador until the country again becomes—as we sincerely hope it will—cruiser-friendly.
The most onerous change has been the recent order by the Admiral of the Navy that mandates that yachts are to be incorporated into a computer tracking system—Sistema de Información de Tráfico Marítimo (SITRAME) —that was designed for commercial vessels. (If you are interested in a description of the Ecuadorian system, in English, we have downloaded it to our website: www.sv-carina.org Select “Our Resources” and scroll down to Ecuador and select SITRAME to download a file in pdf format) If the system’s mandates are followed to the letter, than a sailing vessel is required to report EVERY deviation from it’s predicted rhumb line or waypoints to Ecuadorian authorities while in Ecuadorian waters. The area of jurisdiction: “will be applied in the maritime area of Ecuador responsibility, implicit toward the west until longitude 095 23 00 W, among the latitudes 01° 28' 54" N and 03° 23' 33.96" S; and, 200 NM around the Galápagos Islands…”
The managing Ecuadorian authority is called DIGMER, an acronym for Dirección General de la Marina Mercante y del Litoral (www.digmer.org, And, though the information forms are available on the internet and may be emailed to the authorities in Guayaquil, the net effect for cruisers, at this point in time, is that it has been dictated that an agent must be employed in order to process an entrada and salida (entry and exit) for a yacht for EVERY PORT visited in Ecuador. The agent fees we have knowledge of range from $150 to $200.
We entered Ecuador and were given an entrada before these changes went into effect but we will still have to pay $200 for an agent to process our zarpe from La Libertad. (Our agent: Roque Proaño Párraga, Naviera “J.C.P. Hnos.” Cia. Ltda, La Libertad. Tel. +593-4278-3931, Fax +593-4278-5317, email: navlibertjcp@hotmail.com< or navieralibertad@grupojcp.com. This agency also has offices in Guayaquil and Manta.) To obtain a zarpe, we must report our outbound rhumb line and the predicted date, time and position (latitude/longitude) when we will exit Ecuadorian waters. Alternatively, if we wished to move our vessel from Salinas up the coast into Bahía de Caráquez, we would require a domestic zarpe from Salinas ($200 in agent fees still apply) and then a new agent would take over to process our entrada (and later salida) from Bahía de Caráquez and we would be charged an agent’s fee once AGAIN.
Previously, international or domestic entradas and zarpes for yachts were handled directly by the Capitania del Puerto and the fees were reasonable—that is, on a par with other countries we’ve visited. These new agent fees, which are IN ADDITION TO all of the fees paid previously, make cruising amongst Ecuador’s anchorages and ports outrageously expensive and, as we see it, will virtually eliminate Ecuador as a cruising ground for private yachts.
To exacerbate this situation, Ecuador now has a law that extrajeros (foreigners) cannot buy fuel at subsidized prices. The law is directed at reducing the cost of the subsidies and preventing low cost fuel from illegally crossing borders into neighboring countries where it can be sold at a higher price. Unfortunately, there are no outlets or any mechanism that enables fuel to be sold at extrajero rates.
Previously, Puerto Lucia Yacht Club in La Libertad (PLYC) sold gasoline and diesel but they have eliminated this service. In addition, when we recently attempted to leave the PLYC premises with jerry jugs—and a local man—to try to purchase about 40 gallons of diesel and 5 gallons of gasoline for our passage to Costa Rica, guardia at the gate attempted to stop us from LEAVING the club and told us we could not buy fuel or bring it into the yacht club.
Even though we thought we had a good relationship with the supervisor of the guardia who was then on duty, when we questioned him as to how we would be able to buy fuel to leave the country, he first shrugged and then suggested we visit the Capitania del Puerto in Salinas to obtain written permission to buy fuel. After a 45 minute wait at the Port Captain’s office, the Capitania himself took our question and was surprised we had been sent to his office. He sent us BACK to La Libertad, this time to the Minister of Energy, who, to his credit, was able, eventually, to help us. He explained the law that diesel fuel (as an example) is subsidized and available to nationals at $1.04/gal., but the price for extrajeros was $2.50/gal. The cost for gasoline was higher. To this, we said “Bueno: donde compramos este para $2.50/gal.? (Good; where do we buy this [fuel] for $2.50?)”. He let out a large sigh and said nothing for a few seconds. He then instructed us to go to a local service station where our jerry jugs were filled with diesel and gasoline and purchased (at the national price) in the name of an Ecuadorian local we had hired. The minister met us at the service station and stamped our facturas (invoices) with an official Ministero de Energia stamp and then signed the document.
When we returned to PLYC with our fuel, the guardia at the club stopped us coming back into the gate, checked and then confiscated our facturas, which were the only proof we had that we were not breaking the law. After meeting the next day with the PLYC manager we were able to repossess our facturas. As a side note: reports from the Manta Yacht Club and Bahía de Caraquez indicate that, at least at the time of this writing, fuel can still be obtained at prices above pump prices but below the extrajero rates.
Propane is also subsidized in Ecuador. Recently the country’s supply chain was interrupted by protests and a brief embargo ensued. PLYC employees have also been instructed, by memo, not to help cruisers obtain propane. We have now been assured by Galo Ortiz, manager of PLYC, that PLYC employees will once again facilitate the purchase of propane for cruisers though we cannot be sure this is the case since the situation seems to change daily and we hear conflicting reports.
PLYC has also made other changes. In addition to a reduction in services offered, fees have continuously been increasing. An additional fee, recently initiated, is a “live aboard” fee of $200 per month for all vessels in the yard or med-moored. For our vessel the increased fee would amount to roughly a 50% increase in monthly fee. What follows is what PLYC charges (as per price increase in mid-July 2007, add 12% for IVA tax) for a typical 44’ cruising boat:
Monthly Fee (Med-moor or in yard; slips are roughly double this rate):
$484 (1ST 3 months), $460 (4th), $436 (5th), $387 (6th month and beyond)
Live Aboard Fee (in addition to Monthly Fee): $200
Electricity: $0.25/kwh
Water: $3/m3
Travelift, round trip: $ 377
Re-Blocking (using Travelift): $180
These prices were valid as of this writing. Contact: marina@puertolucia.com.ec. Note also: Galo Ortiz, Puerto Lucia’s manager will be leaving as of sometime in September 2007. We do not know yet who will replace him.
In spite of the changes in the government’s attitude and the recent exorbitant cost increases at PLYC, and at least at the time of this writing, PLYC is a good place to land if you need significant and potentially difficult repairs to your boat. However, there is no guaranty that the excellent resources in place now for such repairs will here when you arrive. (Contact Stewart Yates y Servicios email: systec@email.movistar.com.ec or tel: +593-(0)99-778-868). The 50 ton travelift operates daily and the large yard is paved and (relatively) clean. A plus for PLYC is that the security in the marina and yard is at such a high level that you can travel away from your boat to visit the spectacular and historic sights in South America secure in the knowledge of the safety of your vessel.
As an alternative, Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador with the Bahía Yacht Club, Puerto Amistad and Saiananda offers hosting services for visiting yachts at anchor or (for the latter two facilities) on moorings for $210 and $150 per month respectively, irrespective to the size of your vessel. A Naugala Yacht Services (agency) is expected to open there soon (affiliated with Puerto Amistad) and will charge and agent fee of $150 for an entrada/salida package, solving the moratorium on vessels arriving or departing from Bahía de Caráquez imposed in June by the Capitania del Puerto.
As a result of our experiences during our most recent visit, we cannot recommend Ecuador, in general, and PLYC in particular, as welcoming or economical stops for cruising yachts. We will not be returning to Ecuador until the country again becomes—as we sincerely hope it will—cruiser-friendly.
Report 2
Today we leave Ecuador; our international zarpe is in hand. There are a couple of other things that have happened here that should be added to our letter sent earlier this week to complete the picture of our experiences in Ecuador this year. The first thing that happened was that after 90 days in Ecuador and our refit incomplete (we were without chainplates), Immigration in Ecuador declined to renew our tourist visas. They told us to leave the following day and were unmoved that our boat was not fit to go to sea. Nor would they explain the rationale for their decision. Unfortunately, three separate Migracion Officers (they are Policia Nacional here) gave us three separate indications as to when we would be allowed back into the country (a weekend, three months, six months). We spent two days in Guayaquil trying to resolve this, had magnificent interpretation help from Marisol Stewart (wife of George of Stewart Yates y Servicios) and even got the opinion of an immigration lawyer (also facilitated by Marisol). The advice offered by the lawyer was that Migracion was wrong but to fight it would cost a lot of money. Not wishing to be separated from our boat in a country going through turmoil, we chose to stay illegally in the country for 31 days. Friday we paid fines totaling $400 (are now legal again) and were given three days to leave. We did not report this previously because we were not sure what fines we would face. We thought being illegal was the worst possible thing imaginable until Aduana (Customs) weighed in this week. Wednesday June 25, at around suppertime, a Puerto Lucia lancha arrived at Carina and whisked Philip away to a meeting with our agent and Puerto Lucia manager, Galo Ortiz. The reason was that Customs (Aduana) was threatening to impose a fine of 10% of the value of our vessel because Carina has been in Ecuador for over 90 days. We went on record as absolutely refusing to pay anything and after the tenacious intervention Señor Ortiz and Roque Proaño Párraga, our agent, Aduana signed our zarpe paperwork the following day but indicated other boats here would not be immune from this new "law". Puerto Lucia, maintains, as do their lawyers who are now involved, that there is no legal basis for Aduana's claim. And since Aduana refused to issue a factura (bill) for the money they were requesting, it does appear that this may simply be an illegal attempt to extract more money from cruisers visiting Ecuador. Boats here that haven't yet been in Ecuador for 90 days are being asked to renew Customs paperwork. They are not being asked for a fee at this time. We do not know if this situation is limited to the port of La Libertad/Salinas. It's been an interesting stay here in Ecuador in 2007, and though we'll be missing many cruiser and Ecuadorian friends, and the opportunity to explore more Andean villages, we are looking forward to hoisting sail and heading for the high seas.
posted by rjb @ Monday, July 30, 2007
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