coyote from belize
Yeah, cruising Belize is beautiful, all you can imagine in the idyllic tropical isle resting in an incredibly tourqouis sea filled with tropical fishes and coral fantasy…yeah, that reality is here in great profusion and we’ve had a bunch of it all to ourselves. Tourists and sailors are few, especially Americans. The weather has been stunningly entertaining and resistant to any prediction, the sailing has been all over the place, from barely bearable to the exquisite. The last week we’ve sailed north, inside the barrier reef, 20 or so miles a day, in flat transparent 7-10 foot water, weaving thru coral heads and white sand, the sun perfectly high and at our backs, and the wind, a perfect twenty knots from the SE. We flew Coyote in style and beauty in one of the all time best series of sails of my life. I live for this stuff, so you can imagine how stoked getting it day after day…anyway, that changed with a sudden slamming of the weather door and a grey, windy dash to Belize City— much belittled, much feared (but we liked it), for required visa and cruising permit extensions, water, veggies, internet,internet,internet, where we download and stock up, and then sail out in a rising wind, north again in really shallow waters, heeling coyote to the max to clear the shoals, and make it up to Cay Caulker, famed among sailors as the “hippieville” of Belize, home of five hundred locals (made up equally of long term ex-pats from canada, euroland, us, and belizians- gaurafuna, mayans, latinos), catering to the needs of probably an equal number of young backpacker and aging hip travelers. Robin is going to a women’s gathering in mexico, and I’m staying here to snorkel, do maintenence on Coyote, use the internet to continue my rather obsessive study of money and the financial system, the looming climate, environmental, and oil catastrophies, the rapid collapse of empire… and take some needed alone time to seriously think about how I want to spend the last years of my life. And where? I’m 66 now !!!!. Imagine my shock at that number and remember that you’re gonna be there too before you know it, if you aren’t there already…anyway, I’ve been thinking more and more, “now what?”, and “what’s next?”, what to do and where? How long can I wrestle this big boat around the oceans? Big questions for me, and I’m sure each of you find them bubbling up in your heads at times too, but this is a particularily sharp transition time for me now, and luckily I have the time and a fantastic place to work on some answers… If the world were to stay pretty much as it is, I’d try to keep cruising for as long as I physically could. Nothing that I’ve ever done approaches the freedom, the high state of being on intimate terms with the natural world, and of being immersed in beauty, as the sailing life, the cruising life. If possible, I’d embrace it even more by getting a larger, more livable boat, a large fast catamaran, and head off on a sail around the world. There’s a lot of evidence, though that the financial, climate,and peak-oil stresses are hitting the Third World first and initially hardest and it may not be possible in the near future to sail, exposed, vulnerable, and in safety in much of the increasingly poor and hungry world. Governments are also making it more difficult and more expensive to sail freely along their coasts. Here in Central America, cruisers are expressing more fear than I’ve ever heard about local violence and taking more steps like anti-theft technlogy, avoiding whole areas, traveling in packs and staying more in touch via ssb radio. They’re staying home more. So I don’t know if this kind of life will even soon be possible. Things seem ok now, but there’s definitely a feeling of impending great change here. ~Fred~
