On Sunday morning we lifted anchor and set sail for Guanaja, the easternmost of the Bay Islands of Honduras, about 155 miles from our anchorage in the Vivorillos. With us was Serenity, who we'd met in San Andrés. They have not been having much fun lately: while in a slip at the yacht club in Colón, they were hit by another boat; last week they banged a reef trying to enter San Andrés in the dark; and on their way to the Vivorillos, they were stopped in the middle of the night and boarded by the US Coast Guard, who spent the next five hours going through every storage space on the boat, checking it for drugs. (The Coasties didn't find anything, and issued them a "gold star certificate" as a "clean boat". Whoopie.)
But we and they had an uneventful trip, the only problem being that the wind was just a little too light, so we had to motorsail for 9 of the 28 hours underway. (Going downwind in light winds is too rolly to be restful, and too slow as well.) In the early morning we could see the mountainous outline of the island, a misty distant blue which gradually resolved to green hillsides as we approached. As we got closer, we noticed that although the shore area is densely vegetated, the top half of most of the island looks like a forest fire has gone through recently; the ground is bare between sparse branchless trees, dead and dark. Later we learned that this destruction was caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1999. We sailed in through the Pond Cay cut, the 90-foot channel a blue highway between barely-awash reef banks, then motored around to the anchorage at Guanaja Settlement.
The
principal town on Guanaja isn't actually on Guanaja at all, but on a
rather small cay about a quarter mile off the south shore.
Cinderblock and wood buildings crowd each other around narrow
concrete pathways, spilling out onto pilings at the islet's edges,
the stilt houses connected by decrepit boardwalks. Shallow canals
criss-cross at intervals, doubtless intended for bringing canoes
close to the houses but clearly used for occasional trash
disposal.You would not want to walk home in the dark drunk! The
postage-stamp yards behind the gates are all concrete, no lawns to
mow here, but we did see one tiny wedge-shaped sliver of open grass
with three coconut palms, the only trees on the island. One sported a
sign: "PROTECT THE FOREST". It seemed strange to us that people would
choose to live all jammed together here, with a big, mostly empty
island right next to them. (We discovered the reason the next
morning. We had moved to the more popular yacht anchorage, a
protected bight about a mile and a half away, and things seemed fine
that evening. But in the morning we were bit up by no-see-ums, bugs
so teeny that our screens would be worthless against them. We moved a
bit further out, to a less flat but less buggy spot.)
We had gone first to the settlement because we needed to check in to Honduras. We had read horror stories about officials in Honduras, and in Guanaja in particular, demanding as much as $30 in mordida, inflated or spurious fees which go straight into their pockets. Fortunately, things have changed a great deal. Both the port captain and the immigration official were professional and cordial, and the only charge was 20 lempiras (about $1.25) for the stamps in our passports. As we have only dollars, and the banks were closed for the day, we asked if we could pay with a $5 bill, and that we'd of course accept change in lempiras. The immigration man was quite anxious and apologetic that he didn't have quite enough change and would have to short us 6 lempiras -- about 36 cents!
Although
both officials were hispanic Hondurans who spoke only Spanish, the
population of Guanaja settlement appears to be split about down the
middle between English-speaking blacks (many of whom call the island
"Bonacca", its name when the Bay Islands were English possessions)
and Spanish-speaking hispanics. Signs are in either or both
languages, although official signs are in Spanish. The sprinkling of
fancy houses on the other offlying cays and along the shoreline
belong to English-speaking white Hondurans and expatriate Americans
and Europeans. We wandered around the settlement, sightseeing. As the
shrimp and lobster fleets are currently grounded because those
fisheries are closed for the season, many men were sitting around
shooting the breeze. One young guy, William, followed us around for a
while, but he turned out to be a decent guide, even taking us into
the (closed) seafood packing plant for a look around. He showed us
pilings that used to support houses which got washed away by
Hurricane Mitch. "Oh, it was scary all right. Man, the noise! And
when it was over, not a green leaf left on the island. Not a green
leaf." We offered to buy him a beer if he took us to his favorite
bar, so we three went in to a little place on a boardwalk and sampled
Port Royal and Salve Vida ("Lifesaver", in Spanish), two Honduran
beers. Three old men played rummy in the corner, and much to our
astonishment, the bartender had country music playing on the stereo
system. Not that we're big fans, but when all we've been hearing has
been island rap and Spanish pop, a little Willie Nelson sounds all
right to us!