Jan. 20, 2012
The Jungle Schooner

I didn’t feel so good about being in a river isolated from the modern world with a stuck rudder. Georgetown might have the facilities but that meant running the gauntlet back over the mud flats, sandbars, and fishing stakes to a place that is definitely not safe for small sailboats. At night I cranked on the rudder ropes side to side. Before breakfast I tried again. The situation looked bleak. The current on the river at Parika ran strong and rough waves made getting in and out of the dinghy dangerous. When we returned from a shore excursion we had to drag the dinghy through knee deep mud to launch for the schooner.

I dove under the schooner with gloves on and felt every inch of the barnacle clad rudder where it exits the stern ten feet down to where it stood in the heavy duty shoe bolted to the bottom of the keel and didn’t discover anything wrong. At dawn I cranked on the steering lines again and suddenly we heard a noise. Then the rudder swung free again! After some time I began to think that perhaps when we were aground and bouncing on the bottom, the rudder was jammed up. Now we carry on with our broken rudder and makeshift steering lines not sure when we will ever be able to repair it properly.

Our NYC friend Capt. Dougie built a 65 ft wooden schooner in Guyana and told us about an isolated jungle town named Supanam where they build big wooden boats on the shore. We decided before our departure that Supanam would be our destination. From Parika we looked at our chart of the Essequibo river mouth. After running aground it looked daunting to try to cross 16 miles of islands, shallows and mudflats to go further into the wild. Luckily we met a man from Supanam who offered to take us across in his speed boat to show us the zig-zagging route. It was a great day. We loved the quaint hidden, protected charm of the town and the all the wooden boats perched on the river bank.

We calculated the tides and timed our trip exactly to go through the trickiest parts at high tide. What a relief it was to come in off the windblown wide river and pull into a protected deep little river. We motored slowly past the villages and all the moored junk ferry boats. Friends we were introduced to met us and showed us just where to anchor with bow and stern anchors close to the edge of the river. The leaves of a towering bamboo grove almost touched the schooner as she rested in a swift flowing jungle river.

This morning it began to rain and we quickly set our rain catchment awnings. Alex and Rachel watched one tank fill up and then they repositioned the rain tarp to flow into another tank as Darshen filled buckets from under the cockpit awning. We caught maybe a hundred gallons in two hours and about five hundred gallons by the next morning. In Georgetown, water is expensive to buy and has to go through customs before we could get it. So we opted to take a chance and catch our own water. Today we saw that would be able to take care of our fresh water needs.

This is just a very brief description of what we’ve been doing. All of the emotions, close calls, detours, and drama will be in the book we are working on.

SPOT Satellite GPS position message received

Latitude:6.97272
Longitude:-58.5206
GPS location Date/Time:01/21/2012 09:22:05 EST

Click the link below to see where I am located.
http://fms.ws/6uH8S/6.97272N/58.5206W

Photo will be sent in another email.
Jan.17, 2012
Our Seized Rudder. No Steerage!

After crashing into their pilot boat, we made friends with the surveyor who placed the buoys in the Georgetown channel and surveyed the Essequibo river. I asked him to come with us to guide us from the Demerara to the Essequibo River on Saturday his day off. The reason I wanted him to come is because the charts show the whole entrance to be too shallow for our 10 ft keel for many miles out to sea. In fact the shallows go out so far that land is only hazy in the distance. So there are no landmarks to follow. There are long poles that are stuck in for fish nets which really confused me on the way in. The fishing traps showed up more than the buoys. The real problem for me was that there were no buoys to guide us in past all the sandbars and shallows. That is why I got a pilot onboard to guide us in.

The day started well and we began sailing through runs of tall poles stuck in the mud. I began singing “fish poles on the right of us, fish poles on the left of us we go.” I had complete trust. At one point we could no longer sail in the direction we wanted. We cranked the winch and pulled the steering line attached to the back of the rudder over and over and soon we were hard over. We couldn’t figure out what was happening. I went to the stern and there I could see that the motor was stirring up mud and I knew we were stuck. The way the wind and waves looked on the water, we had the impression we were still sailing, but we were stuck.

I threw the lead line in and measured the depth of the water at eight feet so our keel was two feet deep in the mud. We still had four hours of rising tide so I figured we were ok. We put the schooner in reverse and it took us an hour to get off and get going again. Then we hit the bottom again but it was hard like sand and we started bouncing. This went on for an hour until sunset and we came free. We measured the bottom at 24 ft and knew we had a straight channel in. Still trusting our pilot we continued into the pitch black river pushed by a strong incoming tide.

The steering felt a little stiff but I didn’t notice anything until we made a u-turn in front of the town of Parika preparing to motor against the incoming tide to tie off along side a tug boat. When we cranked the winch to straighten out the rudder the line became taught and we knew the rudder was stuck over. While we tried to straighten the rudder we drove in a circle and realized we had no choice but to drop anchor.

At dawn we were awakened by ferry boats bringing people into town from the distant jungle. Colorful boats were moored to poles along the edge of the river. One little island between us and the beach was surrounded with white egrets. The rising sun rimmed the jungle tree tops with gold lining.

SPOT Satellite GPS position message received

Latitude:6.86235
Longitude:-58.42712
GPS location Date/Time:01/14/2012 20:34:59 EST

Click the link below to see where I am located.
http://fms.ws/6rUWn/6.86235N/58.42712W

Jan. 14, 2012
Demerara River, Georgetown

After we accidently broke a window on the pilot boat, we tried as dignified as we could under the circumstances to ask where would be a good place to put the boat for a few days. They pilot men looked stern at first, but soon relaxed as they saw we were just a private boat with ladies and a baby onboard who wanted to see their country. We were directed to anchor way out in the river in the midst of ship traffic and the current ran stronger than any anchorage I have seen in my life. Stepping down into our boats and getting ready to head ashore was awesome and a little scary. We always wore life jackets and carried extra safety equipment. Only the most skilled and strong could attempt to row in these waters.

We have been busy adapting to life in port. Carly had to return to NYC as planned. Andy and Dusty decided life on the schooner Anne was not for them. Luckily Rachel and Alex who worked for months in NYC to get us going are still onboard. It is a rough life. There is always an enormous amount of work that’s overwhelming and difficult to ignore.
At dawn a pilot boat directed us to move and pointed to a dock on the shore. We had a successful move using our steering ropes and had to move again when the small cargo boats we were tied to had to move.

The locals all talked about pirates as we wondered what we could do besides be on pirate watch. We look even shabbier than when I pulled in from the 1000 days sea voyage. I don’t think we look like a good catch. It is said to be safer in the jungle than near the city so we are heading there soon. I thank god for so many things.

Soanya’s View:
The last time I was in Guyana it was ten years ago. Returning here on a boat is very different. It is as if I’m seeing it for the first time except the pigeon English that they speak is very familiar. Georgetown is as raw as it ever was. The smell of greens, fruit, burning, and garbage mixed with the sights of people in uniforms of all kinds and people in regular simple clothes, poor people, better off people, mini-buses everywhere, motorcycles tearing through with no rules of the road. The marketplace is colorful and a bit much. Outside of the marketplace is quite civilized with sidewalks bits of green grass, cars, street lights, and colorful buildings ranging from solid looking concrete construction to tin roofs and wooden palette walls.
We ate some of the best bananas on the planet, sampled sapodilla, curass (fish), poloury (fried chickpea flour), fresh coconut, dried coconut, mangoes. We’ve seen flocks of egrets, herons, a frigate, and other cool unidentified birds. And there’s still a whole lot to see, eat and do.

Jan. 12, 2012
6.48 N, 58.10 W

We arrived in Guyana on Jan. 9, 2012 and only now have had a chance to sit at the computer. It was an exciting entrance into the country and with all that has happened in between our memories become dreams and reflections on sparkling windblown waves. The full moon was so bright the night becomes day and we catch our sleep when we can. It was a good thing we had a GPS because the entrance to the Demerara river was very difficult. The shallow water goes far out to sea, the land could hardly be seen, and small buoys with hand painted numbers get all mixed up with hundreds of fish trap poles. We had stiff wind sailing into the river and dropped our sails in front of the Maritime controllers’ office. I decided to tie off along side an old steel pilot boat and our feisty figure head on the bow, the Sea Serpent, kicked out the window of the pilot boat on the dock. (to be continued…..)

SPOT Satellite GPS position message received

Latitude:6.66918
Longitude:-57.10855
GPS location Date/Time:01/08/2012 17:31:42 EST

Jan. 8, 2012
06.49 N, 53.34 W, Course W, Speed 3, Wind 10 knots

Our landfall to Guyana has been based upon the easterly trade winds and the Equatorial current which flows “up to 4 knots” northwest up the northeast coast of south America. We often sail comfortably along at four knots and figured if we didn’t want this powerful current to sweep us up the coast we would have to sail way east and loop in. That is what we have done. I think one reason this part of South America is so unexplored by other sailors is that it is very difficult to sail from the Caribbean against the Equatorial current.

We have planned our landfall on Georgetown for midday on Monday. We have to catch the tide while it is rising so we can ride up the river before it starts to go out. It is the same way with the Hudson river. We try to never sail against the current of the tide because we don’t make much headway even if we use the motor.

The tricky thing about entering the Demerara river is that the wind and waves blow downwind unobstructed into the mouth of the river. Landfalls are easier when there are dominant landmarks and the entrance is protected from the wind and waves. A few days ago we were in big waves and gale like winds. The possibility of entering under those conditions was a little daunting. Now as we cross over the continental shelf the waves are much smaller and the water is cloudy green. On top of that the wind is dying down and we are beginning to wish for more wind so that we can catch any tide in on Monday.

In the photo, Andy shoots the fore gaff from the top of the foremast  looking astern. This is the first time on the whole voyage that we sent a man aloft. We feel very lucky about that because we re-rigged the schooner just before leaving and had to re-use all our old blocks and ropes.

SPOT Satellite GPS position message received

Latitude:11.5434
Longitude:-54.83801
GPS location Date/Time:01/05/2012 07:05:28 EST

Click the link below to see where I am located.
http://fms.ws/6nA-R/11.5434N/54.83801W