Well it is June now. The official start of Hurricane season.
What it really is, is the start of the rainy season. Sea temperatures increase, more evaporation, more hot sweaty days and rain.
www.nhc.noaa.gov/
What is means for sailors is a mixture of calm light wind periods mixed with periods of strong winds and squalls, even hurricanes.
We scooted south to Belize when some bad weather hit the Caribbean coast of Mexico and run up into the Gulf at the end of May.
We have just recently come to the mainland and hid in the anchorage off the town of Placencia, southern Belize, when some nasty storm systems hit the coastline to our north, Belize city north, and our south, Bay Islands of Hondurus.
We are not far from our intended ‘hang out’ for the bulk of the hurricane season. We have preliminarily booked a place in a marina up the River Rio Dulce in Guatemala.
http://tortugal.com/marina-rio-dulce.html
The mouth of the river is about 50 nautical miles away. A day sailing with fair winds. We have met some boats here in southern Belize who intend on staying in the Rio Dulce too. They have planned to enjoy more time snorkeling and diving in Belize and wait until a major storm drives them up the river later in the season. We have heard that there is also a group of sailors enjoying the Bay Islands of Honduras with similar plans.
This all sounds like a great idea, but we have a problem.
There is a sandbar at the entrance of the river. This sandbar is only 1.67m below the water at low tide. We have a keel that extends 2m below our waterline.
This means that we are limited to entering the river at high tides only. A spring tide, when the sun and moon line up to create a very high tide, would be give us the most water to cross the bar safely. There is a spring tide on June 16th and another on July 3rd.
http://www.tide-forecast.com/locations/Rio-Dulce-entrance-Guatemala/tides/lat
If we want to be safe, we do not have the freedom that many of the shallower drafted boats have to ‘scoot’ into the river when the weather turns foul. Knowing our luck a bad storm, or even worse a hurricane, will come sweeping up the west coast of the Caribbean just when it is neap tides (when there is a very low high tide) and we get trapped outside the river.
Costs: (Remember $2 Belize = $1 US)
$12 Belize ferry return
$20 Belize for a taxi return to customs and immigration for one person (negotiable if you ride share with other boats)
$7.50/person charge to check out of the country with immigration
Additional $5 Belize/day if you have over stayed your initially quoted days when you checked in.
Now that we are checked out we hope to get fair winds Sunday and sail all the way to Guatemala in a day, 40 nautical miles, but you know how temperamental the winds are this time of year. If we make it all the way we will stop at Cabo Tres Punta to line ourselves up for the Tuesday morning crossing of the bar. If the winds are light we will stop at one of Belize’s off shore cays on the way down and split the trip in two.
