Six days before Christmas – on Ambergris Caye we see red, green and white lights wrapped around palm trees, twinkling at night on the shore. The store windows have all been decorated with holiday greetings and shop owners where santa caps. We hear the occasional Christmas tune blasting from a radio at a beach bar.
This place has grown on us now that we seem to have come to the end of the “persistant moisture” (as one local put it) – 5 days of downpours. Never to sit on our laurels, we stepped up to a new level of cruising during these rain showers by instituting a system to harvest the rain for our water tanks. It made sense to see what we could catch since it’s a mystery as to how available good water will be as we move through Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. With little imagination we were able to collect about 30 gallons of water before running out of containers. Now we'll get serious with the tarp and hose!
But once the sun appeared we immediately turned our focus to the reef close at hand at which we have been staring from our back porch. There must be 30 dive operations lining the beach here, and we had plenty of opportunity to compare offerings while waiting for better weather. You know it when you find it -- after only a few minutes with Suyapa at Ecologic Divers, I knew we found our dive masters. She was friendly, personable, interested – a real standout. We have loved our 4 dives and spent quite a bit of time learning about the area through the eyes of Ecologic’s staff; Charlie, Gilbert, Suyapa and Efrane from this island & Steve from Chicago. All of the dives have been a blast, located minutes from the shore, with great visibility, lots of marine life and fabulous coral. During our first deep dive, I swam over the coral into a canyon and saw one nurse shark, than another, then another, and another…. I couldn’t help but think back to last year when we saw our first nurse shark in St. John and how I almost rocketed straight up into the air!
We both enjoyed our first night dive ever, which we did in the Ho Chan Marine Park. A perfect night, there was a bright starry sky above us as we slipped over the side of the boat and headed underwater. We observed parrot and trigger fish sleeping nestled the coral, coral feeding on bloodworms, stingrays snuggled in the sand, eagle rays gliding around us, lots of lobster who seemed to be watching us as we watched them, huge crabs serious about their dinner and a glorious white sea anemone devouring it’s meal. It was a very cool experience and much less creepy than I expected! It wasn’t until we were back in the boat that Charlie, our divemaster, informed us that the first thing he saw at the bottom was a lemon shark but it swam off before he could point it out to us – had I seen that shark first thing, my dive may have been over right there. We have also snorkeled the reef a bit; it is basically just down the block in our dingy.
Another highlight this week was a hunting party on the reef by Rick, Ken and Ephrane from the dive shop. I will let Rick tell the tale, although I will say that a great feast of conch, snapper and lobster was devoured on Dragonfly that afternoon – all prepared Belize style by Ephrane. We have been gathering all sorts of recipe's from folks we meet -- fried lobster brain has been described as scrumptious, and hogfish as a gre.t eating fish. The local joke is that Belize grouper = Barracuda. We have been warned to keep our eyes open during our sails for white grouper floating in the water, it's extremely valuable (even if illegal).
With the rain came additional boat projects. A leak appeared in the master cabin so we went into serious troubleshooting mode to figure out where it was coming from. This meant pulling down ceiling panels, pulling out shelves and wall panels, fashioning dams of duck tape and towels to test theories. Of course it meant reorganizing our stuff to sleep in another cabin, so we moved totes full of stuff from cabin to cabin, moved mattresses, sheets, pillows, etc. You think 4 cabins is plenty of room but in reality it all becomes storage space pretty fast. You probably don’t want to read about our holding tank challenges; hopefully everything is fixed – the sky is overcast as I write this so perhaps we’ll know soon!
The town here is very complete yet still has a Caribbean flavor– we have strolled up and down “front”, “middle” and “back” streets, it isn't charming as some towns are but it has almost everything a cruiser couple needs. We have found at least 3 huge hardware stores and multiple large grocery stores. There are also a handful of mom & pop grocery stores, and little vegetable/fruit vendors, wood handicrafts, beaded jewelry and fabrics sold on the beach. They don’t have the Saturday market that we found on almost every island last year but I was thrilled to discover “The Greenhouse” which sells amazing produce (lettuce, broccoli, spinach – a real treat). Of course there is the usual t-shirt and tourist shops, and prices are expensive as everything is imported, but at least we can provision and replace what is needed. The area is pretty busy, even more so this week since the kids have their school vacation but I guess it really is hopping starting Christmas. We have tried a few more of the restaurants and continue to be impressed with our meals, although we find ourselves most often at the doorstep of Dande’s Frozen Custard – chocolate and rum raisin to die for! The proprietors are from Pennsylvania, have lived here 8 years and when looking for a new business they decided that the island needed a really great chocolate shake (frappe) – and I can tell you that it is fantastic!
Soon we’ll move south 8 miles to Caye Caulker for a visit to the more "laid back" town and then we hope to start hopping through the smaller cayes toward the outer atolls. The few cruisers we have met seem to have spent extensive time in Belize and consider San Pedro to be "dull" and "ugly" and light up when talking about all the beautiful little islands we'll come across when we start traveling. These past few days have really jump started this experience, I can’t wait to see what is ahead.
