Joshua seemed to remember in Mexico hearing that sierra was an excellent fish for ceviche. I don’t know why, but I was skeptical about whitefish in ceviche after having some rather chewy snapper once; previously, I had only had tuna ceviche, or else various shellfish.

At any rate, we had caught a modest-sized sierra directly after we hung a left from Bahia del Sol and still had a bit left over after a day or so. Joshua used the remainder for a ceviche snack and damn was it good. Those Mexicans weren’t kidding; sierra is indeed a perfect ceviche fish. We all but inhaled the batch and pined for more.

More. Caught right around the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It can be clearly seen that this fish is about the size of Joshua’s leg, in spite of the reckless camera angle. He carefully filleted the thing to produce nearly an entire one-gallon freezer ziplock full of fish meat.

With eight pounds of fresh sierra, we could make a truckload of ceviche.

SIERRA CEVICHE

* Eight pounds of FRESH sierra. No, really, you don’t need that much. But it’s a mighty powerful feeling to have it, I tell you.
(Veggies)
* Onion, finely diced; at least, I like to finely dice things.
* Tomato, finely diced.
* Garlic, finely diced.
* Green pepper, sliced into ¾-inch long juliennes. (For the hell of it.)
* Jalapeno, finely minced. Of course, El Salvador does not deal in vegetables that contain any perceptible spice so sadly, this ingredient was absent for our Santa Elena ceviche.
* Avocado, chopped into reasonably sized chunks.
(Irritants)
* Lime juice (I don’t need to mention that this needs to be fresh.)
* Vinegar, we used sherry vinegar; red wine vinegar would be good too.
* Water.
* Salt
* Spices if you want: pepper or a bit of cumin.
* Cilantro for garnish. I sadly didn’t have any.

The moment the anchor was down I was in the galley happily waving knives at our veggies. I tend to prefer a lot of vegetables in things so I minced a healthy amount of onions, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers; save the avocado for last. I chucked about a quarter of a teaspoon of salt into the blend as well. (Also, I seem to remember reading someplace that one isn’t supposed to use metal bowls or metal utensils when preparing acidic things like ceviche.)

Somehow the photo-taking process broke down after I got the veggies chopped so this is the last illustration. At any rate, here’s a lovely shot of freshly diced veggies shown against an exotic backdrop of authentic Costa Rican jungle.

Then, I called Joshua down to deal with the raw meat part of the deal. He carefully sharpened the knife (because sharp knives are a joy to use) and sliced a reasonable amount of fish into half-inch cubes (bigger pieces would take longer to cook and we were hungry).

Now to add the acids that will ‘cook’ the fish and mellow the onion/garlicy parts; basically, you want enough liquid to just cover the lot. The ratio we have found to taste best is roughly one quarter lime juice, one quarter vinegar, and half water. Mix this around and let it stand for around fifteen or twenty minutes (or however long it takes to cook the fish). Once the fish is cooked, taste it and adjust your flavors, adding more salt if necessary, pepper or cumin if you want, or more fresh lime juice. If it tastes a little too piquant, you could add a tiny bit of sugar to mellow it out a bit; we only need to do this if we went overboard on the lime juice or vinegar. Now add the chopped avocado, carefully mixing it into the ceviche so it doesn’t disintegrate. If cilantro kept worth a damn, I would have minced a bit to sprinkle on top.

We ate it on crackers with a dab of Marie Sharp’s habanera hot sauce. Cold beer, of course, goes brilliantly with this.

We ended up bringing the boat back to the dreaded El Coco anchorage anyway the next day. Because Jeff needed to get his stamp still from the Immigration lady and we needed groceries and gasoline for the boat, we figured we may as well deposit Jeff and his baggage at the El Coco bus station and get all our business done in one trip. Jeff double and triple bagged all of his belongings inside his duffel bag and I sat in the front of the dinghy with them held high during the landing. We had good timing, plus it was early in the morning when the swells are not as rough, and we only got a little water in the boat.

We arrived at the Immigration office around 9am or so and the lady seemed truly surprised to see us. I told her hello and that we brought the father this time. She smiled and was actually extremely friendly. She stamped Jeff’s passport with yesterday’s date and sent us on our way saying, “I’m pleased to serve you!” We kept telling Jeff, “She wasn’t like this yesterday, really. She was SURLY!”

We ate some breakfast, saw Jeff off on the bus to Liberia, did a lot of walking back and forth trying to figure out our plan of action (groceries, gas, ice, both? Laundry?), and finally headed off to the grocery store. The El Coco grocery store is really well stocked and has a lot of imported products, probably due to the large expat community (or gringo time-share owners). The prices are a bit on the high side—we were told by a local boat guy that groceries in Liberia are cheaper—but we didn’t want to deal with a bus ride to buy only a few things and then we proceeded to fill a cart with almost more than we could carry. The wine and booze selection is particularly elaborate although by this point we were trying to limit our load and there is a French bakery right in the store—a good one too, in my starved-for-baked-goods opinion. The first day we visited I agonized over the quiche loraine or the raisin bun (those flat spirally things with the raisins and custard) and went with the raisin. This day the choice was between the quiche and a ham and cheese croissant, so we got both. The croissant didn’t survive more than ten feet out the door of the store; it was so good—buttery and the cheese was Gruyere or something (i.e., fancy cheese). Since it contained easily seven thousand calories, we wrapped the quiche up in the now oil-soaked paper baggy for later.

We lugged all our stuff back to the dinghy on the beach and regarded the surf conditions: bad. Ugly and bad. And noisy. The tide was maybe two hours before low tide and there were about thirty surfers a hundred meters down the way by the reef bobbing in the waves. We had prudently brought a plastic bin to put stuff we didn’t want splashed in and we set about filling it with all the imprudent things we thought we were going to dinghy-surf back to the boat, like paper towels and toilet paper. We put the lid on and placed the bin squarely in the center of the Porta-bote. The remaining bags of groceries we tied up to one of the seats to keep them more or less upright if we did any bouncing around. We decided that ice and beer would have to wait for the second trip (we had to come back for the laundry anyway) and pushed the bote down to the water.

I removed my shorts and put them on the seat to keep them from getting totally salted and we sat and sat waiting for a break in the waves. Finally Joshua decided we had one and started in with “go go go!” while I whimpered “no! wait!” but pushed the boat out anyway because I always say that. Joshua jumped in to start rowing and while I continued pushing the stern out until I was thigh-deep or so. Joshua started shouting “get in! get in!” and rowed madly into the swell; then the swell broke and water poured into the bow. This swell pushed us back toward shore a bit too and I could see a large set of swells coming in. Joshua kept rowing out and we took a second and a third into the boat; me bailing as fast as possible. Now Joshua was trying to turn us around to go back to shore but another swell broke right on us as we were turned broadside, nearly flipping the bote and swamping it completely. We were in the water by now and pulled it as far as we could back onto the beach, which really wasn’t very far because it now weighed a ton with all the water. We were both sandy and drenched and I was still kneeling at the stern bailing like madman as each wave crashed into us, filling the boat again.

This is when we noticed that the transom was cracked, right in half. Either it cracked when we nearly flipped or it cracked as a result of the waves that were coming in bashed into it. Then we noticed that all our bags of groceries were bobbing all over the place and the plastic “splash-resistant” bin was floating on its side in the middle of the bote. We carried all these up the beach a bit and then went back to remove the cracked transom. We didn’t know how we were going to get the bote it up the beach at this point; we couldn’t budge it at all with all the water inside and we couldn’t empty it because every other wave or so that came in filled it with water. One of the surfers came over and asked if he could help. Between the three of us, we were able to lift the bow a little so that water poured out of the floppy part of the stern, then drag it a little further up the beach. Joshua bailed the remainder of the water out while I scooped the sand out with my hands.

We pulled the dinghy up to dry sand and tried to figure out what to do. The groceries were totally drenched and the plastic bin was full of water. Our earlier plan to make two trips—one to ferry groceries to the boat and the other to fetch beer, ice, and laundry—was dismissed as crazy talk and Joshua took off to get our laundry. I set out to dump the water and reorganize the grocery situation and then I realized I still was in my underwear, so I rinsed the sand out of my shorts in the surf and put them back on.

I put the broken bote back together as Joshua returned with a large garbage bag containing our laundry; now we could get our clean laundry drenched too. Excellent. After assessing the grocery damage, we discovered one soaked roll of paper towels and other than a squashed avocado, only a little bit of one roll of toilet paper got wet. Everything else we bought was pretty much impervious to salt water. We moved the remaining paper products to the laundry bag, repacked our poor abused bin, and Joshua started tying up everything with all sorts of fancy sailor knots.

By this time, one of the local guys who seemed to hang out on the beach came over to see what was up and help. He was an older guy with a beard and we distractedly chatted with him about the surf exit. We turned the boat around, pointed it back at the waves and pushed it down a little to watch for a lull. And we watched for a lull for a long time. So long that the guy finally abandoned us and wandered off. We turned the boat around and pulled it back up the beach again. I had to go find someplace to pee or else I’d die and we just weren’t ready to face the waves yet. I went to find a bathroom and get a couple of beers (the last we’d have for a while since our ice and beer plan was totally shot) and left Joshua standing, staring at the ocean.

When I returned, Joshua had waded out into the breakers to see how deep it actually was and declared that they mostly break only at about waist level—so, if we could just push the bote beyond this point, and very very quickly, it should be fine. Two of us in the water could probably do this quickly enough but then getting back into the pitching bote might be too hard to do in a hurry so it was decided that one of us had to jump in earlier and paddle while the other continued to push it out. Once the rower was beyond the breakers, the pusher would swim out and climb up into the boat as well. I was to be the rower and Joshua the pusher/swimmer.

After we finished the beers, we turned the bote around and pulled it down to the water. I really didn’t think that the surf had mellowed out and was not feeling very optimistic. I actually could feel my chest pounding at times, I was so nervous. Since we were only in toe-deep water, we had to pull the bote in farther. Then waited some more, watching as the pangas anchored out beyond the breakers bobbed up and disappeared down in the swell. We pulled the bote farther again—as far as we could before just having to go for it. I kept saying, “No, not now, look at how huge that one coming is!” And Joshua kept saying, “We have to go sometime, we just have to go.”

Finally after two gnarly waves brought in a lot of water and floated the boat high, Joshua started pulling the boat out. We were going now and I started in with the “Oh shit, oh crap, oh shit, oh crap” and began yanking on the bote; at about thigh-high water I vaulted in. Grabbing a paddle (I didn’t have time to set up the oarlocks) I frantically paddled on one side then the other, Joshua pushing from behind. The swells were beginning to get bigger again and I started to swear loudly. “They won’t break—just keep going, and keep it straight.” Joshua was shouting from behind because he couldn’t push me anymore. The boat bobbed up steeply over a swell, which didn’t break or else I would have totally freaked out, and then did it again with another steep one. I popped the oars in the oarlocks and inexpertly rowed like a crazy person out out out until Joshua started shouting at me again, “STOP! Wait for me! You’re OK!” It seems I had totally left him behind and he was swimming, trying to catch up with me in the water. Honestly, I had a hard time stopping and the swell felt insane even though it wasn’t breaking. We didn’t get a drop of water in the bote at all, aside from what dripped off Joshua when he climbed in. I was shaking terribly and needed the row out to the boat to calm myself down.

Once back at the Time Machine, we rinsed the sand off of ourselves, then unpacked, rinsed, and dried all our groceries. At the bottom of the bin, we found the quiche loraine. We had forgotten about it completely and there it was, un-squashed and still wrapped in the oil-soaked bag. The crust was perhaps not exactly flaky anymore but no worse really than any several-hour old quiche that hadn’t been dunked in the ocean. We discovered we were starved and ate it for dinner.

[Assessing the damage.]

We spent our first official day in Costa Rica in El Coco wandering the streets in the rain, being sure to drench those parts that may not have been entirely soaked during the surf landing. We had to check into the country, even though we’d already been kicking around Costa Rica (and even had, gasp, gone ashore once or twice) for the last week, easy. The port captain’s office was simple enough to find except there was a padlock on the gate leading to the front door. We wandered over to some police dudes loitering around the entrance of what probably was the police station and asked where the Port Captain was, explaining our predicament with concerned faces—that we want to check in, but… The policeman said it must be a holiday and to try again mañana, then he assured us that it was fine for us to be ashore in the country even though we had not yet legally entered since he saw us and decided we looked nice. Well, OKAY. We headed out on our various secondary missions of the day: ice, beer, internet, and cowboy hats (not necessarily in that order, well, ice and beer were definitely first-ish).

By the time we got back to the boat, an offshore wind had kicked up some icky chop and between this and the largish swell coming straight into the anchorage (El Coco offers no protection; nor, incidentally, do it offer coconuts), I felt queasy within an hour just sitting on the boat at anchor. We decided to head back around the corner into Bahia Culebra (Playa Panama) where we could anchor in a more protected spot and there spent a peaceful, if rainy, night.

The next morning, Joshua and I rowed ashore at Playa Panama to take a bus over the hill to Coco to do the check in, even though everyone was totally against this idea and I had only suggested it in passing and I’m a terrible, terrible person. Sheesh. Anyway, we began by having to wait a hundred years for the bus, which was late, and then it didn’t even go all the way to town but dropped us at a crossroad. Then it started to pour and, since a connecting bus was not forthcoming, we walked on a narrow road with no shoulder the three kilometers to town ourselves. The bus passed us right as we entered town and we were totally soaked and covered with mud spatters—basically looking and feeling our best for the Port Captain.

Outside the office (happily not padlocked this time) a few pieces of soggy cardboard had been placed thoughtfully at the door in hopes of keeping people like us from mucking up the office. We went in and requested to enter the country with our boat. The first question out of the secretary’s mouth was, “Is your boat anchored here?” And we of course had to say, “Well, nooooo…” She was instantly irritated and informed us that it had to be anchored in the El Coco anchorage to be checked in, then she harrumphed and asked to see the three copies of our title, two copies apiece of the passports, and one copy of the previous country zarpe. We didn’t have copies of anything and it was very clear that this was not acceptable at all. Through all this I sheepishly explained that we had been anchored in El Coco yesterday and tried to come check in but the office was closed and we talked to the policeman and the anchorage was impossible with the large swell so we moved the boat to Playa Panama. But of course we were happy to bring the boat back as soon as we could to get everything done properly. And of course we will make copies of everything, no problem. And I smiled nicely and did my best to look properly repentant for not having the copies ahead of time, and I tried to ignore Joshua’s Look of Doom. And I pretended like the secretary was not freaking out that we didn’t even have the boat with us nor did we have the necessary copies but that she was simply informing us that this was what was necessary for us to get things going. And that somehow seemed to work. She just sort of stopped being all bent out of shape, called in the Port Captain and explained the situation in a normal tone of voice.

The Port Captain was a very Port Captainy-looking guy, an older, slightly overweight dude with a mustache. He could furrow his eyebrows and look stern, or raise them to look nice and grandfatherly. He started out with the stern when she got to the part about the boat not being here (this was, of course, right at the beginning) but then turned grandfatherly as I embellished the story with how I was getting seasick with the huge swell in the anchorage but that we would be happy to move the boat back to El Coco ASAP if that would make things better. We would leave right this moment to do it, in fact. The Port Captain conferred with the secretary for a bit and then went back to his office. She told us that we needed to bring the boat back around and do it by 2pm. This was utterly impossible since it was pushing noon and it had taken us all morning to get to El Coco; to come around the point with the boat would take another two hours, if there was no swell/choppiness (which there would be) and wind (which there wouldn’t be). I carefully explained this and emphasized that we would absolutely move it first thing in the morning (when the sea is mellower) and be standing on her soggy cardboard when they opened the next day. No. Not possible. Her position seemed to be that this was a border and we had to be cleared before we could set one foot further into the country and never mind that with a little date-checking, it was highly likely we had been somewhere in Costa Rica for over a week. A little of the former exasperation returned, thereby cuing my sheepish and repentant expression, but she again talked to the Port Captain, trying to figure out how the hell they would deal with this highly abnormal situation.

The fact was, they were going to process our entry today, even if it killed several adorable kittens, and they had to figure out how to organize things with the Customs guy, who actually had to drive over from the airport in Liberia (maybe 30 miles away) to inspect our vessel. Which wasn’t even in town. The Port Captain got on the phone with the Customs guy, fully explaining the entire situation including the bit about me feeling seasick from the “muy feo” anchorage. The Customs guy still had to come and we would have to figure things out when he arrived; if it was still raining, it was likely that he wouldn’t even want to go out to inspect the boat at all. We all hoped for rain and the secretary sent us down the street for the requisite copies.

Upon return with the copies, paperwork got cheerily processed by the Port Captain who asked us all sorts of questions about this and that. The secretary sort of hovered around making sure he didn’t break the fax machine when he tried to use it or that he used the right phone to make calls. He then sent us down the street to the Immigration lady, who we needed to appear before at 1pm because she was currently on her lunch break. The Customs guy was due at the Port Captain’s office at 2:30, but best to return at 2:15.

We walked into the Immigration office and handed over our papers to the lady and she was all set to just process us as normal when she was derailed by a phone call from the Port Captain. It was maybe 1:05 and the Customs guy was ALREADY there! And were we checked in yet? And there was another issue of extreme importance, which was they needed to confirm the ‘manga’ and the ‘calado.’ She asked me about these and I had to say I didn’t know those words—what was a ‘manga?’ She put the phone down and paced about a little saying, “manga, manga, how can you not know what manga is,” and to the couple of guys who were fussing over a computer box they had just been dust-gunning out on the porch she said, “What is manga in English?” They answered her with blank stares that indicated they didn’t even know what ‘manga’ meant in Spanish and went back to the computer. She picked up the phone where the Port Captain was still giving her an earful about how the Customs guy was waiting and this manga thing and called me back behind her counter, thrusting the phone at me, “You talk to them.”

Once on the phone, a thing that generally terrifies me when trying to speak a foreign language, I was able to figure out that manga* meant ‘ancho’ or width; calado as it turned out was draft. Evidently the Port Captain was going over our paperwork with the Customs guy and the fact that a 32-foot long sailboat had an 18-foot width yet only weighed three tons was not adding up. I explained that the boat was a trimaran and that cleared everything up; the Port Captain laughed and said, “OOOhhhhh!!” and the Customs guy in the background said, “Trimaran!” Back to the Immigration lady, who was standing in front of me with her arms folded. I returned to my position at the counter while the Port Captain told her another five or six times to hurry up and get us processed so that the Customs guy wouldn’t have to wait or whatever and she finally hung up, glaring at us.

We handed her three passports, including Joshua’s dad’s, who elected to stay with the boat in order to keep the sea snakes from hijacking our dinghy. She quickly did the math and asked where the third person was. We explained that he was Joshua’s father and was on the boat and she was not pleased. “He has to be here PERSONALLY to be checked in.” Okay! We said, we’ll have him here first thing in the morning. But no, not possible she said; her office would be open until 4pm and if we did not produce this father, well, dot dot dot. Here we had to explain about the rough anchorage and the boat being in Playa Panama and not in El Coco and the seasickness and all the rest. Very put out at this point, she gave us the immigration forms to fill out, “Hurry! The Customs guy is already waiting!” We handed them back to her and she went to go call us in—and she called in all three of us. Whoever it was she called us into made her wait for seven minutes (rolled eyes; pointed glances at the wall clock) to get back to her with the ‘okay—we weren’t wanted by Interpol’ or whatever verification she needed and she stamped our passport photocopies for the Port Captain (basically, she fudged it a bit and cleared Jeff as well) and then Joshua’s and my passports. “Jeff Coxwell has to come in personally!” she repeated, and did not stamp his passport. We said first thing tomorrow was the best we could do and is this okay, but she only snorted and stomped back to her desk. We went straight back to the Port Captain.

And the Customs guy was nowhere to be seen. The Port Captain said he would return in one little moment and just wait here. And we waited and waited and he and the secretary kept sort of peeking out at us and finally the Port Captain got on the phone to call the Custom guy’s cell to tell him that we were waiting. Again he told us that it would be very soon. Customs finally pulled up at 2:30.

The Customs guy was young and smartly dressed with pressed Levis and had not only driven over from Liberia, but had someone else driving him altogether; he didn’t seem at all concerned that the boat was not at the El Coco anchorage. We got in the car and headed back to the boat while the Customs guy gave the driver a hard time about his driving. We wondered if he really intended to go out to our boat, since he would have to negotiate the dinghy launch through possible surf to see it; I had already mentioned that it was a rowboat and not some fancy motor dinghy. I also casually mentioned how wet you can get launching a dinghy through the surf (ha ha). Playa Panama is nowhere near as bad as El Coco, but still, we typically strip down to our underwear to keep our clothes from getting soaked. As we arrived and walked out to the beach, a particularly large set of swells broke one after another. The Customs guy watched these and then looked out to the boat. “Is that the boat?” “Yes it is, the dinghy is about 100 meters down the beach,” we replied. “Yeah, I’m not going to go out there.” And with that, he shook our hands, handed us the completed paperwork and went back to his car.

* We later looked the word up and discovered that ‘manga’ means ‘sleeve,’ ‘cloth strainer,’ or, in nautical terms, ‘beam.’

We arrived yesterday morning and are currently waiting for the immigration office to open back up after lunch. We sort of screwed up and are not actually anchored in town, but around the bend in Bahia de Culebra–and this may or may not be a problem. We sucked up to the Capitania de Puerto and his secretary and after a their initial irritation, they became super friendly and chatted up the aduana guy in Liberia for us. He has to drive all the way out here to confer with the Capitania and go see our boat but if it is still raining (it has been, cats and dogs), he says he won’t even bother.

Wish us luck!!

Starting Friday before our planned departure (Monday or Tuesday), we began making the trek across to the ocean side every morning at high tide to observe the bar. Joshua’s dad had arrived the day before and we had only to do a few hundred small things before we were ready to leave—and we were ready to leave. Like yesterday. Last month!

Friday’s bar was ugly. We sort of gazed at it without saying anything trying to pick out the so-called ‘channel’ and exit point. Breakers were all the way across and coming from two different directions, causing some gnarly looking turbulence. Every so often though, there would be a bit of a lull where you could imagine maybe jetting across before the next set came in. Our boat, under power, is unfortunately incapable of achieving anything close to ‘jetting’ and so we were dismayed. Jeff said, “You have to go through THAT? Well, we can always just stay here if the swell is too big.”

[Saturday’s bar. You have to sail between those sets of breakers for a mile or so.]

Saturday we wandered over after a tasty pupusa breakfast to check it again. And it looked great! As good as we have every seen it, in fact. We had to restrain ourselves from running back to the boat to take off that moment because it may never be so calm again. Sunday also was good, although the swell was a little bigger. “The waves were more defined,” was Jeff’s tactful way of putting it. We still needed to provision vegetables and were not feeling optimistic about getting the necessary navy and immigration paperwork completed on a Sunday. We decided upon a Tuesday departure, conditions holding.

Monday was spent running around doing all the last minute stuff. The navy guy filled out our ‘zarpe’ (clearance) in such a slow unsteady hand that I wondered whether he had been maybe accidentally shot in the head at one point. But he was very nice and he would pronounce each major term carefully in English for us while we congratulated him on his fluency. “Last. Name.” “Clear. Rance.” (Beaming.) It took him about an hour to fill out the nine or so blanks required on the form and we finally staggered back out into the sun with our Clear Rance. I tracked down the Immigration Guy, a man who processes maybe two or three forms every month or two and is supposedly available “twenty-four hours in the day,” but he was very busy in the bar drinking coke and watching Chuck Norris putting some right back into the world (i.e., kicking ass and quipping bad puns in his gruff, all-business voice); he told me to come find him again in an hour or two. We then spent an excruciating number of hours gathering vegetables for the trip, for which we had to take a bus all the way to Zacatecoluca. Finally, by the end of the day we had our food and the Immigration guy managed to fit us into his tight schedule (Maria Querida, a soap opera, came on sometime in the early evening and there was no way work could be done during the show.)

Tuesday we ate our last El Salvador pupusas and walked over to check the bar at three hours before high tide; it looked okay—a little rough but we were hoping that was due to the tide and not the swell. We went back to the boat to take the dinghy apart and hook the motor back up to the boat. Jim and Susie from Sparta dinghied over to say goodbye and then headed out ahead of us to watch our departure. There was actually some wind and we pulled anchor under power and full sail and headed for the bocana (mouth) of the estuary.

As we made the first turn into mouth before the channel, we took the main down because the turbulence was knocking the wind out of the sails. Jim and Susie were motoring along beside us with their dinghy and Peter from Sereia also was following us out with his inflatable. Going was slow but the deeper section was clearly defined, if rather confused and choppy. We had stacked all our extra jugs of water as far back as we could inside the boat and Jeff sat on the stern to add additional weight and babysit the motor. We could hear it pulling out of the water and cavitating and Jeff reported that it had been dunked completely under water twice, a thing that little motors generally do not like, but it kept running with only a few alarming lulls in power. Once outside the bocana, we turned to the right and ran in between breaking sets of waves. The breakers coming in from the outside would rear up and either fall off or break and flatten out before they got to us, then they would again break on the other side of us. This part was the creepiest—it was stressful and just took forever; however, the sea in the channel was much smoother with no confusion. Jim and Susie and Peter couldn’t go any further than the first turn out the bocana and they already looked like tiny specs. We got to the end of the channel after a largish set passed and turned out, passing over the bar in around 14 feet of water. FREE!

[View from OUTSIDE the bar.]

We kept the motor running until we had cleared 50 feet of depth and then turned towards Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Wind was light—maybe less than ten knots—and we sailed quietly for the rest of the day. Towards evening the wind died and we started the outboard and arranged watches; I ended up with the 2-6am watch and when I got up, there was an ominous black smudge blocking the horizon right where we were supposed to go. Joshua went to bed with the words, “yeah, you might get wet.” Crap. I fretted about the storm for a while and then decided to take action and dodge it. I altered course 30 degrees and strained my eyes see if I was making any headway. Dodging a storm is not as exciting as it seems when you are bouncing around at 3 knots. I kept thinking that the black smudge was moving away from my spreader mark-point only to discover that I had drifted off course and it really had not moved perceptibly at all. Two hours later though, progress had been made and I had passed it halfway. Now, I could see all the lightning on the other side and got stressed out all over again. Finally everything disappeared when it got light at 5:30am. Neither Joshua nor Jeff had any significant sign of weather during their watches at all.

The next morning we woke almost to the eastern edge of the Gulf of Fonseca. I crashed out for a while and suddenly this wind hit. We were several miles offshore and with the wind blowing off land, we were in some ugly steep chop. I bounced around in the bunk while trying to nap until I couldn’t stand it anymore and got up to assess the situation. The sails were double reefed and Joshua and Jeff were chatting nonchalantly while trying to keep themselves in their seats. Bleah. The wind lasted several hours with us pointed as high as possible into it to keep from getting too far off land. By night we finally were closer to land (as the wind finally slacked off) and passing Corinto, Nicaragua’s major shipping port. I took first watch this time in hopes of avoiding those early morning squalls and proceeded to keep Jeff awake all night putting the sails up and down as the wind shifted annoyingly around. I think both the main and the jib went up three times and down three times by the time I was finished and finally Joshua took over as the wind kicked up. Again, we got pummeled by the gnarly off-shore wind while I tried to sleep. Jeff was in danger of being tossed from his bunk on the high side so he got up to ‘sleep’ in the cockpit. Two reefs went in and finally they took the mainsail down entirely, running on jib alone, to keep the boat from bouncing all over hell and gone. The wind lasted four or five hours and then mostly died.

The next day we had strong but steady wind. This time we were comfortably close to land and were able to sail smoothly and quickly. I had been totally irritated by the periods of either no wind or very strong wind and choppy seas of the previous days but after a day of regular wind and not having to think about starting the motor, I pretty much forgot about the un-fun bits. The strong wind was also tiring; we double-reefed and reduced sail to the storm jib (like the size of a napkin) after we busted our cheek block (holds the jib sheet) and had to jury-rig a substitution. We decided to take a break and arrived to a small anchorage listed in the Forgotten Middle as “No-Name Bay.” Actually, it did have a name—as did the small village (El Astillero)—and it was an awesome anchorage. We ate cooked food and slept and Joshua and Jeff went ashore under the pretext of needing fuel to check things out (we did not want to hassle with checking into Nicaragua and this anchorage wasn’t supposed to have the facilities to do this). There was in fact a navy guy in this village and he was interested in why we were there, but after they explained, he was happy to let us just hang out for the night and buy fuel (and ice!).

[Broken cheek block is that wanged-out thing up around 1 o’clock.]

The next hop down the coast was to San Juan Del Sur, which sounded like it might be a kind of cool spot to check out. The town is the big beach “tourist” town in Nicaragua, but we found it to be rather sleepy, really. We spoke with the navy there and discovered that we would be able to stay the night (even a couple nights if we wanted) and go to shore and get a new zarpe and we would not have to take a bus to the border to do the whole immigration/customs bit. The guy assured us that all we had to do was give the port captain a call Sunday morning—“6am no hay problemo”—and they would actually come out to us (!) to give us our new zarpe. Well, okay! The next morning we called and called with no answer until finally we rowed ashore to get the zarpe. The captain and all the navy guys were watching some action movie at top volume and by the time we got the clearance to leave, it was pushing eleven o’clock.

We sailed off our anchor and headed for Bahia Santa Elena, of which we have heard excellent things. The sail was fast and smooth and we caught the biggest Sierra we have ever seen right at the border of Nicaragua. That way if the Costa Rican Navy came, we could say—OH, that fish we caught in Nicaragua. They never came, of course, and we made it to Santa Elena right before it started to rain. Yay!

[Storm clouds over Bahia Santa Elena.]