5/26/02 | Back in Roatan

Simple pleasures are often the best, they say, and at the moment we are thankful for the simple pleasure of a well-protected anchorage. I don't have to gimbal the stove to cook. We don't have to hand-over-hand along our grabrails just to walk from one end of the boat to the other, and we don't have to sit down to shower. We have taken the fiddles off the bookshelves and removed the padding from the bottles in our liquor cabinet. No waves slap against the hull, no halyards rattle. Perfect stillness, perfect silence.

Windom sits quietly and motionless in Jonesville Bight on the south coast of Roatan, about a hundred yards from the Hole In The Wall, the gringo bar we visited (by taxi) while hunkered down in French Harbor three weeks ago. With us are Guy and Annika on Street Legal, with whom we spent an enjoyable week at West End, and who gave us waypoints and advice for the tricky entrance. They came here the day after we left West End for Utila, which turned out to be excellent timing because when the howling westerlies arrived, they not only made the West End anchorage dangerous and uncomfortable, but also prevented the boats still there from leaving since the shallow entrance becomes impassable with large waves. Geoff and Sue on BlueJacket, who we last saw back in San Andrés, are also here; we saw them passing by, motoring into the west wind, and gave them a call on VHF. They had been on their way to French Harbor, but once we sung the praises of flat calm Jonesville Bight, they decided to come on in as well. It is so protected here that we can't tell what the weather is like outside; the inner bay always has gentle winds and flat water, and in fact the local shrimping fleet uses this as a hurricane hole. As shrimp season is closed, the shrimp boats are idle. One near the Hole In The Wall is used by the local kids as a jungle gym; they climb up to the end of the outrigger and then jump off into the water.

Our trip here from Utila's Puerto Este was mostly uneventful. We didn't need to wait for good light as Puerto Este has a fairly wide entrance and we were following our previous GPS tracks, so we left just after breakfast for the 36-mile hop. The land effect of Utila gave us light and variable wind at first, and then as we headed eastward toward Roatan the westerlies began to fill in. Since we wanted to get to the entrance with midday light, we couldn't afford to sail slowly, so we motored until the wind built enough for us to sail downwind at a reasonable pace, then put up the jib and enjoyed the rare opportunity to sail east. Of course, the weather gods pulled their usual stunt, and we were enveloped by a huge rain squall just as we approached the harbor entrance. We hove to for a while (a method of deliberately stalling out the boat) and then grabbed a brief window between squalls to come in. Shortly after we had passed between the reefs, the skies opened again, and it didn't stop raining until exactly fifteen seconds after we'd finished setting anchor. Despite the pouring rain, Bob (the proprietor of the Hole In The Wall with his wife Rhonda) kindly came out in his skiff to guide us into the "inner harbor" by his bar. This route required a zig around a long and difficult-to-see shoal, followed by a zag within spitting distance of the shore in order to pass under power cables at their highest clearance. Later we learned that Bob was not entirely altruistic; a fishing boat came in at the wrong spot a few years back, hitting the power lines, and it knocked out the electricity to everyone on the bight for several weeks.

Bob and Rhonda in their fine drinking establishment

So here we are, waiting for weather -- which in this case means waiting for things to return to normal. So far while we've been here, the wind has changed from howling westerlies with intermittent squalls, to near-calm conditions, but we'd really like to be able to sail rather than motor the 95 miles to Glover's Reef. Meanwhile, we have this very nice drinking establishment a short dinghy ride away, so naturally we have spent a few hours and a few lempiras hanging out with Bob and Rhonda. (The Honduran currency, colloquially called "lemps", is at around 16 to the dollar. Fractional coins exist but are rarely used; paper currency runs from 1 up to 500 lemps. It seems strange to have a bill worth only around 6 cents!) There is also excellent snorkeling not far from the harbor entrance. Since Roatan is oriented sort of northeast-southwest, the island creates a bit of a lee from the westerlies, so the water is pleasantly smooth. Just offshore the bottom is around 20-30 feet; then it drops off in a tremendous wall and falls out of sight. We didn't see too many fish (the islanders hunt with spear guns and scuba tanks and have largely wiped out the big ones other than in protected areas like West End), but we did bag a few medium-sized snappers.

We had noticed a buoy near the channel, which Rhonda told us was a dive site, called "Calvin's Crack". So we got out the tanks and dive gear, and along with Geoff and Sue went out to have a look. The "crack" was a pretty impressive fissure, beginning at the 20-foot "upper bottom" and cutting down and out in a narrow channel lined with coral and sponges. It was as if an Arizona slot canyon had somehow gotten transported to the ocean. At the deep blue exit onto the wall, we were at 90 feet, the fissure walls towered 70 feet high above us, and the wall continued to drop out of sight below us. Snorkeling around the mouth of the bight just west of here -- which we reached through a really cool dinghy canal through the mangroves -- we found more cracks and crevices along the wall. The dive shop where we refilled our tanks told us we'd found the "Dragon Cracks", so the four of us went back and did that with tanks as well. The wall here is even more spectacular than at our first dive site, actually overhanging in many spots. Azure vase sponges glow eerily, devil's whip coral corkscrews out like giant pipecleaners, giant anemones wave their pale blue tips in the hint of current. We've seen only a few dive boats out here, taking advantage of the wind shift to dive the windward side of the island, so we feel like we have the entire reef to ourselves.

On the morning SSB net the cruisers who have been here joke about the "Hole In The Wall Vortex". It's like the Hotel California, or maybe a roach motel. Rhonda and Bob sailed in here eleven years ago; now what's left of their trimaran sits under their dock, barely visible at low tide. Many other gringos we have met here also are ex-cruisers, with similar stories. Guy and Annika joke about their first visit to Jonesville Bight -- they stopped for the night, and stayed five weeks. But they finally left this morning, taking advantage of the now calm weather to head east without having to buck the trades, and we are getting anxious to leave too. If we stay much longer we will melt into the landscape with all the other offbeat misfits who drifted in here and never left. We're starting to drink too much, and argue with each other too much, and in general are suffering from "barn fever"; like horses who scent home, we are getting anxious to get moving and on with our plans. Now all we need is for the weather to cooperate.

Moonrise over Jonesville Bight