We jumped the gun a little, antsy from our confinement in a grubby harbor, and headed out to the Cayos Cochinos with the wind still upwards of 20 knots. Lumpy, bumpy seas smoothed out a little as we got away from Roatan's coast, but it was still a roller-coaster ride and we were happy to be going, if not exactly downwind, at least not upwind.
The
Cayos Cochinos are a group of small islands between Roatan and the
north coast of Honduras. The two major islands are jungle
mountaintops, thrusting up out of the sea in a smaller echo of the
mountainous mainland coast just visible beyond. The yacht anchorage
is in a bight of the largest island, where several moorings have been
placed in front of a small dive resort. We swam around a little, but
the visibility was disappointing and the coral nothing special. More
interesting was the island; trails run from the resort to a light
tower on the highest hill, and to a small village on the east shore.
The village consists of about a dozen mud-and-straw huts on a white
sand beach. Each simple building has its square of sand around it,
swept and spotless. When we walked through, the men were out fishing;
the women waved and greeted us, some in English and some in Spanish.
Many of the people on these Honduran islands are Garifuna or "Black
Caribs", the descendants of Carib Indians and escaped or shipwrecked
African slaves, who were forcibly resettled from the Eastern
Caribbean around 1800 by the British.
The high point of the island, where the lighthouse is, is 471 feet above sea level. This does not sound particularly high as high points go, but it's reasonably lofty for a tiny island only a mile wide. Alas, the thick jungle vegetation cut off any hope of a view. If the ladder up to the light hadn't been inside the structure, behind a locked door, we would have climbed up just so we could see. But we enjoyed the forest for itself, the dense greenery and the constant music of songbirds, so different from the bare hills of Guanaja we hiked two weeks ago, less than 50 miles away.
From the anchorage at Cochino Grande it was difficult to determine the actual weather conditions "outside". The ridges above the bight act as giant funnels, trapping and collecting the wind before spitting it out in great violent gusts. One moment Windom would be sitting in perfect calm on glassy water; the next moment we'd be slewed off to one side or the other, pulling on the mooring line in 25 knots of wind. Ripples on the surface of the water, heralding the wind's advance, made interesting patterns across the anchorage. Our wind generator alternately whirled like a demon and rested motionless.
But we knew that the wind here, between the mountains of the mainland and the ridge of the Bay Islands, has a predictable diurnal pattern. Because of land effects, the wind is usually lighter in the early morning and builds during the day. Naturally, the waves build the same way. To take advantage of this, we left Cochino Grande for Roatan shortly after 6:30 in the morning. We started out motoring in wind too light to sail in; soon were on a pleasant beam reach, and soon after that we were reefing the sails and bouncing in 15-20 knots. By ten in the morning it was blowing 20+ consistently, but we soon slipped into the lee of Roatan, and shortly thereafter we were in the anchorage at West End.