Hello everyone! For this hurricane season, we went 20 miles up a river called Rio Dulce in Guatemala, to stay safe and do a HUGE retrofit on Nesi. Here is where we are.
Rio Dulce has been a fantastic place to get work done on the boat. Unlike the Caribbean, the labor here is affordable, competent, and motivated to work. We’ve done a TON of important projects.
Guatemala is a remarkable country — exploding volcanos, surreal lakes, and an unreal steaming hot waterfall that is a natural sauna.
Being so close to USA, we were able to get off the boat and visit friends & family in California. After being 2 years in East & South Africa, and 2 more years in transit, we were glad to finally re-connect with our community.
What happened last year?? We sailed all through the Caribbean. We went radio silent for awhile, because our schedule was non-stop. We had no extra bandwidth!
We felt like those college backpackers who travel through Europe at Mach Speed, trying to see 15 countries in 20 days… just packing it all into a flurry of sights and sounds.
Why were we moving so fast?
As you know, the Atlantic hurricane season (June-Nov) is no joke. The “reasonable” insurance options only allow us to sail in most of the Antilles around December 1-May 30. We’re technically permitted to sail only half the year!
Insurance companies give sailors four basic options during hurricane season:
- Stay in Grenada/Trinidad for 4-6 months. This is a preferred approach, but we found it gets old and expensive quick.
- Sail to New England or back to Europe. A long way to go, in the wrong direction 😉
- Sail to Aruba/Bonaire/Curaçao, which is off the coast of Venezuela — so we decided to avoid going there.
- Sail to Panama; but there is wild lightning and torrential rain after June. We’ve done that before, and we didn’t love it.
Can you believe that insurance companies don’t offer storm coverage for boats in Guatemala– even though it’s one of the safest places around? Go figure! So it was a little gamble on our part, but it paid off.
The Caribbean has LOTS of amazing islands. With limited time to sail each year, many sailors end up doing multiple seasons here.
We decided to go fast and furious, in our quest to return to the Pacific, and avoid the ongoing insurance headache of the Caribbean.
We took the risk and went the long way — sailing up from the Antilles up to Bahamas and Florida, then around Cuba and down via Belize to the eastern seaboard of Guatemala.
Stopping in Rio Dulce also aligned our timing with Panama’s dry season (which begins in December) and the best time of year for a transit to Galapagos.
In the coming weeks, we’ll share highlights from our travels in the Caribbean, reasons why this route worked so for us, and the impact of our experience here in Guatemala.
