THE RIO CHONE ESTUARY
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, 02 August 2007

A Western-Canadian friend once pointed out that Regina, Saskatchewan, was the only important capital city that was not situated on a river or body of water. I let that sink in and left the obvious remark unsaid. Most important cities are in fact situated near water. Try to think of large cities that are not. Not that all seaside or river cities are important. Bahía de Caraquéz, for example, is not at all important.

The town lies on a sandy isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and the huge estuary of the Rio Chone. It could theoretically be a big port I suppose. But Guayaquil, 200 miles south of us is bigger with a much bigger river mouth. Manta, two hours away by bus, is bigger too and home to the largest tuna fishing fleet in the world. Bahía and the Rio Chone are just little backwaters by comparison. Whatever larger vessels might have come in here in the past, the El Niño rains and a couple of big earthquakes put a stop to it all by silting up the mouth of the river. Even yachts like ours need a pilot to get in and out now. There are no big loading docks, no oil terminals here. There never were.

There is some fishing here, though; both in the river and offshore. In the river, fishermen in dugouts lay out nets at certain stages of the tide, use throw-nets from the beach at low tide, jig for shrimp or use hammers and chisels to break out oysters at the extreme low tides. These people are dirt poor and live hand to mouth. There are some fishermen with somewhat beaten-up, open, twenty-two-foot, fibreglass “pangas” used for coastal fishing. They pass us by on their way in from the sea at odd hours of the day or night, their underpowered outboard motors moving slowly up the river against current. The men, young ones and old, weatherbeaten ones, are tired after a night of work and some have T-shirts wrapped around their faces to protect them for the elements.

There are also two traditional, double-ended fishing smacks with blue and white may-pole masts raked sharply forward - at least until they pull up the huge mainsail- They also have out-sized bamboo booms, enormous mainsails and small fractional jibs –no engines of course. These boats depart for sea slack high tide to catch the ebb, their huge Bahamanian mainsails billowing. The mainsail is unbattened, not attached to the mast except by the halyard; no hard hea; the sail loosely laced along the foot to the bamboo boom; and the sail panels cut parallel to the leach. They pass us on the way out, the ancient, toothless, dark-brown fishing skipper sitting in the sternsheets with his hand on the tiller. The boat is about 28 feet long. There are twelve fishermen aboard, spotted around a boat that looks too small to carry them all. The smack also caries six dugout canoes, laid athwartships and sticking out to one side or the other like torpedoes waiting to be launched. The smack has a keel but no weights below the waterline. It’s basically like a lifeboat with a huge mainsail. When a stronger wind is blowing across the isthmus from the sea, the double-ender heels but not excessively. The two boats are painted blue on the topsides and the dugouts are radiant blue as well. They will spend two or three days out along the coast, the men going out from the mother ship, two to a dugout, and returning to sell their catch. While they are at sea, their whole lives are in that smack: working, cooking, sleeping, bodily functions, the works. I suppose they work along the reefs on the coast. So maybe they land to sleep and cook. But I don’t think so.

I was taking some pictures of the boat one day as they were unloading fish along the beach near Puerto Amistad. One of the crewmen, a strikingly large black man (there are not many black people in Bahía though there are a lot up near Esmeraldo), waved me over and invited me to take his picture. He also lined up the whole crew for a snapshot from the grizzled and toothless, captain to the rather dense twins in their twenties; they all grinned at the camera. Now they wave every time they sail by Vilisar at anchor. One night I went on deck late to relieve myself. The same way that you tend to cross smaller streets “by ear”, so to speak, and are almost run down by a silent bicycle, I was startled as the ghostly fishing sloop zished by quite close to Vilisar. I had not heard any engine, of course. There were no running lights either. But the tide was turning and they were on their way out, the men still getting settled in the places for the ride out, the skipper at the tiller. They wave and shout good-naturedly and soon the dirty grey sails and the azure-blue hull are swallowed up by the night. They are under sail. When they turn to the left a half mile down river to cross the huge sandbars at the river mouth, the sails begin to luff and they seem simply to let the current carry them out. When they come back in a day or two later, they will get a push from some passing pangas.

Go to some waterfront towns, Chicago or Toronto, for example, and the waterfronts are dead. Not just because it is frozen for part of the year. But there is no commercial traffic. On a summer weekend the odd speedboat or plastic sailboat, at best. The water seems lifeless. Manhattan’s two rivers are busy, San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound and Vancouver have life because they also have commercial traffic, ships coming and going to faraway places.

Well, Bahía doesn’t have ships coming and going to faraway places. Everything is local: the fishing smacks, the pangas, the dugouts. Now that Quiteños are here for summer vacations in their summer houses and flats there are also waterskiing boats and an occasional pleasure sailboat. Although the locals have been pleading for years for a bridge across the river, they still have to make do with a car ferry and passenger pangas running back and forth across the sandbar-strewn and tidal Rio Chone between Bahía de Caráquez and San Vincente. There are long lines of holidayers and locals waiting to board the ferry.

I like to take the car ferry. For one thing it is free and passenger pangas cost 29 cents (U.S.). So, I save some money. But it is also much more interesting. The big landing craft pulls up to the beach in the middle of town near the square and loading and unloading is done across the beach. The landing site on the other side is just beach too, a little outside tiny San Vincente. The beach is so well packed by the ups and downs of the tides that the sand washed down from away inland in the Andes repacks firmly over and over again. The beach, in other words, never gets chewed up and unusable so they don’t actually need to pave the ramps. There is no real infrastructure, in other words.

When the tide is up the barge simply backs out from the landing beach, swings around in its own length and steams off directly across the mile-wide estuary. But when the tide is down and especially at the springs when the sandbars are clearly visible in spots and identifiable by the change in water colour in others, the captain has to take the ferry far down river near the mouth, slow down to feel his way across the sandbars and then speed back up the river again. The voyage has become at least three times as far compared to high tide and a lot longer. Even longer if he gets stuck on a sand bar and they have to wait for the tide to come up. At present they are using two barges but normally there is only one in action at any time.

I suspect that a bridge is a long way in the future. First, the Rio Chone is very wide. If a bridge were to be built it would be a long way up river from Bahia and thus tourist traffic would bypass the place even more. Second, does the traffic really justify a bridge? It would be a lot cheaper to keep the two ferries going. Finally, any bridge would have to be a floating bridge because I suspect the soil mechanics here – basically sea-bottom sand raised up by the collision of the tectonic plates
(I almost wrote Teutonic plates) – would not be suitable for anchoring a real bridge. Politicians keep promising that they will nag the government for a bridge. Nagging costs nothing. But Ecuador has been so broke for the last twenty years that it cannot even keep up the highway to Bahía let alone build a bridge. Renegotiate the oil contracts and re-schedule the international debt and then talk about bridges.

At present they are usually running two car ferries. This is the Pacific Coast Highway, after all, running down through Columbia and on down to Peru and Chile. Tourists are travelling the highway. Schools run on different schedules in the Ecuadorian Andes and on the coast; sierra schools let out about two or three weeks ago and suddenly all the apartment building in Bahía that have never shown a light in the window since we have been here are now lit up at night. And there are lots and lot of tourists waiting to cross the river. They all drive recent-model SUV’s and come from Quito. Guayaquilenos don’t come this far north: they have their own beaches. Of course, the poor people won’t be travelling down to the beach from the barrios of the capital so these must be the well-off, the children lolling in the back seats playing portable computer games and with I pods stuck in their ears. It could be Los Angeles.

The outsiders join the throngs of locals plying back and forth with their babies on their hips, loads in plastic bags. Sometimes there are campesinos in from the country, a dozen men, women and children in the back of a medium-sized stake truck, all eyes and smiles and having a good time in the big city. Sometimes they will have animals or poultry with them. The passenger pangas, by contrast, are sober and businesslike affairs. People do not usually talk to each other and there are no hawkers and peddlers. But the car ferry is a moving town. People get out of their cars or chat with the peanut brittle and candy salesmen, the toothless orange sellers, the spivs trying to unload pirated CDs or DVDs through the car windows. Big trucks are loaded first followed by the cars: the vehicles usually back on so they can get off quicker on the other side. The foot passengers stream on and off first, some pushing bicycles. While the ferry moves slowly through the sand banks there is laughing and talking and the peddlers sing out the wares. One guy has come aboard with a tricycle loaded with toilet paper and similar toiletries. He is delivering them to San Vincente but he tries to make a little turnover on the way. When we leave the boat in San Vincente, the ancient orange seller is in a corner of the deck peeling oranges and still calling out his wares.

I am on my way to Maestra Quan Qui, the smithy. He is of Chinese descent; his father started the business. It is the usual dusty and dirty outdoor smithy with about eight men working there. You can forget bronze anywhere in Ecuador, but they do good work in San Vincente in most metals including stainless. My intension, now that we have a little money on the account, is to pick up and pay for a couple of items I had asked him to make three or four weeks ago: a new pawl for the anchor windlass and a new and stronger key for the fuel and water tank openings in the deck. It’s a good thing I enjoyed the trip over because, of course, they have not completed the work or even find the items. Maestra is, as so often, away in Guayaquil, and could I please come back tomorrow. Oh, well! It is almost one o’clock and I am hungry. I take the faster passenger panga back to Bahía. To hell with the 30 cents.