Day 4 Cay Caulker.

We woke at 2am when the rain started. Everyone got up to close hatches and bring in clothing we'd hung out to dry. The wind blew in strong through the window at the foot of my bed and I felt the occasional splash of water but it was too hot to keep it closed. In the heat and with the driving wind I worried that I would be dehydrated in the morning but it was never a problem in the high humidity. Just before dawn I had to pull the thin sheet over my shoulders to stay warm.

The first day without our skipper was a little stressful. I tried to remember all the things he told us about raising the anchor while Kim and Brian huddled around the map in the cabin plotting out our course for the week. During the night someone had anchored upwind from us and appeared to be floating directly over our anchor. We didn't know what you were supposed to do when that happens. To pull in the anchor you use a winch set in the front of the boat. This pulls the boat towards the anchor point until it's lifted from the sand. If a boat is parked over our anchor point, pulling in the anchor would get us uncomfortably close.

Ricky, Amanda, and I went into town to buy supplies while Kim and Brian programmed waypoints into the navigation computer.

Before he left, Freddie gave us a speech about Cay Caulker. "The Cay is only three or four streets wide but if you walk around you will be offered every type of drug. Cocaine, marijuana, crack, heroin... Now I'm not encouraging, or discouraging you, but drugs aren't allowed on the boat. Still, this is one of the few places on earth where you can go into a bar and openly purchase and smoke a joint. God bless em."

I found the Cay Caulker scene to be pleasant. Everything was quiet and slow. People walked barefoot on the dirt roads. I noticed the peculiar way locals would sit together on a step, silent except for the occasional word spoken without looking at each other.

We wanted to buy sweet bread, fishing lures, ice, and lighter fluid. The book recommended Glenda's bakery and we walked up and down town several times before we found it. The building was empty there was no one behind the counter, no shelves of merchandise, and the connected room had a single empty table with light streaming in through the gaps in the floorboards below. We called out and after a few minutes a woman yelled back that they were out of stock. We never saw anyone.

We eventually found the Cay Caulker Bakery and bought jelly filled cinnamon rolls, sugar buns, and croissants. The woman at the counter was distracted by something happening across the street. I couldn't figure out if it was the man sitting on the step of the house across the way or the little girl playing outside.

The yards we passed as we walked through town were filled with tropical plants, palms, and jungle greenery. We passed a mesh enclosed bird cage but the doors were open and nothing was inside. The buildings were painted with bright colors.

We couldn't find any ice that looked clean enough to drink but we bought lighter fluid and recognized the fishing store only after walking by it twice. The man inside was very happy to sell us stuff. "Good timing! We just started a sale!". He told us stories about catching barracuda and other fish. He told us you had to beat barracuda over the head with a mallet when they came on the boat. I wasn't sure if we needed the food but I had to admit using a mallet to land a barracuda was compelling.

While Ricky perused the weights and lures I took pictures. The shop was connected to a small shack being run as a restaurant and when Ricky paid for his fishing gear the man had to go over there and ask for change. I wandered outside to take pictures but Amanda's waterproof camera stopped working.

A sunburnt local came into the shop and started up a conversation.

He was a retired ex-pat wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops with a white beard. He told us how he'd been here when the island was split in half by hurricane keith and how he spent all his time fishing and loafing around. It didn't seem like a bad life.

When we emerged into the bright sunshine Ricky looked down into his bag with dismay. He said, "Why did I buy all this crap?!" He'd bought two lures (one that dove shallow and one that would dive deeper), 5 spinner lines, 8 hooks, and three weights.

In use, both lures skipped along the surface whether we used the engines or were under sail. When the wind was calm they would sink and we'd have to reel them in and pick seaweed off the hooks.

We returned to the catamaran and set sail.

Raising the anchor and letting out the sails was a bit stressful. Kim mentioned how relaxing it was to be in motion without the vibration and noise of the engines but it was hardly any quieter. Sailing the catamaran was like sitting in a swaying plastic room while burly men threw buckets of water at the walls.

Outside of the shelter of the island the wind and waves grew and the water slapped against the sides of the boat and splashed up through the trampoline. The winds came in at 20kts and on average our boat did about 5kts. Ricky took the wheel for a while and boasted about getting the speed up to 7.1kts. Steering the boat so the wind hit the sails at the best angle took some skill. The boat turned about ten seconds after you'd moved the wheel and the wind and the surface seemed to shift faster than that. So the first leg of our trip was a drunkards path, zig-zagging as we over corrected again and again.

The boat had an autopilot but we never managed to get it to work. You could set a course (angle on the compass) and lock it in place but then it would spin the wheel until we were 50 degrees off course and sound an alarm complaining it was unable to keep the proper heading.

Brian and Kim had programmed a series of waypoints on the computer in the cabin and it was possible to bring up the angle and distance to the nearest point with our gps. This was invaluable. We would still be sailing around the carribean without it. A few of the reefs had to be navigated like an invisible labyrinth. We'd steer from one unmarked point to another for a half mile or more, watching the depth gauge like a ticking time bomb. You pay a lot of attention to these navigational clues when the water is shallow. There's nothing like having less than 2 feet of water between your rented $400,000 boat and the sharp coral reef to sober you up.

On the first leg of the trip we saw the tail of a manatee as it dove beside the boat. A little later we saw a pod of bottlenose dolphin and another manatee.

The wind grew stronger as the day progressed and we soon reached Spanish Cay.

Spanish Cay is described as containing a research base, protected manatee habitat, a museum, a restaurant, and a dive shop. It looked deserted. We anchored a few hundred feet from the concrete breakwater and broken dock. There was a narrow concrete bridge over a channel in the island and two wooden buildings.

It was our first island that wasn't blaring with dance music. We took the dingy to the concrete waterbreak and locked it to what was left of the rotten wooden supports. The pastel colored buildings were shuttered and locked but a blue float and the line of conch shells on the beach suggested it had been used recently.

We could see a broken fence set in the water and some planks stretched between posts leading into the lagoon. The sand was littered with sea wrack.

We followed the path into the mangrove swamp. There was a boardwalk built out over the marshland and signposts set at intervals along the path. The boardwalk was tilted at unusual angles in a few places where the posts had sunk into the mud and the signs were just empty boxes without any information. It was like we'd wandered onto an abandoned construction site.

Amanda's camera stopped working again and we fell behind the others while I tried to get the screen to clear, banging it on my thigh and blowing water out of the crevices. Our group had three different models of waterproof digital cameras and they had all failed after only a few days in the Belize.

We ran to catch up with the others and the boardwalk led us to a group of empty buildings and a raked white sand beach with palm trees and hammocks set out for tourists. A little farther back there were more buildings, a museum built on the pier, seveal pastel colored guest houses, the unfinished foundation of a water tower covered in rebar, and some sun bleached wooden steps leading up to the empty restaurant.

We found them sitting on the step with a local. They seemed so sullen and quiet when we came up I thought something was wrong but they were just discussing whether to dive the next day in the slow, indirect way island people spoke.

The high winds that made for such good sailing were not good for diving and we decided to call the next morning to see if the conditions were ok.

On the walk back we spotted a bunch of shorebirds wading in the deeper puddles by the path. Amanda tells me there were sandpipers, mangrove warblers, grackles, a whimbrel, and a wilsons plover.

We returned to the boat and put on gear for snorkeling. The visibility was only 10' but we still saw an assortment of colorful reef fish and coral. Just past the anchor there was a hole and a mound of sand. I swam down to look inside and saw a huge crab the size of a bowling ball.

While we bathed and rinsed I helped distract Amanda while they baked a surprise platter of brownies for her birthday. When she walked through the cabin to change, she said "It smells like brownies in here!". Kim replied "Oh, that's probably just the sweat beans."

That evening when we washed our dinner plates in the sea water off the back of the boat, biolumenscent plankton stuck to the dishes and our hands. Peering into the darkness we could see lights flashing and bobbing in the water and when Amanda brought out her flashlight we found the surface was full of small fish and sea snakes. They scattered when the light came on and rushed back when it was switched off.

We played a simple dice game (CLR) under the deck light before bed, watching the cruise ships lit up like Christmas trees in the darkness. I was so glad I was not on one of them and I tried to tell the others about David Foster Wallace's long form article on the culture of cruise ships.