I might be making this place sound worse than it is, but it is one of the worst anchorages that we've been at in a long time. The city of San Pedro is quite quaint. It's a major tourist destination and has 3 dirt streets which as named Front, Middle and Back. Everyone, and I mean everyone, uses golf carts to get around. Golf cart rentals is a very competitive business and you can rent one for $10 US per day. Not bad! The streets are quite narrow and it can be quite harrowing being a pedestrian at times. There's a river which leads to a large interior lagoon and there's a ferry which crosses it. The ferry is big enough to hold 2 golf carts and a rather hefty gentleman pulls it across using a rope! I would have loved to have gotten a picture of that, but I didn't have my camera at the time.
San Pedro has a good sized airport and lots of tourists fly in and out. High speed boats which hold maybe 20 people each zip between the other cays and Belize City. Unfortunately they also zip through the anchorage making it very dangerous to dive on your anchor (a must) and throwing up big wakes. The anchorage is just behind the reef and has no protection from land. The seas have been fairly good sized and are coming over the reef. Between the waves and the wakes, it's rock and roll city! The holding there is poor as the bottom is flat coral with a thin layer of sand over it. You need to find a place that has 6"+ of sand and hand-set your anchor. It took me 3 dives to get the boat positioned and the anchor set.
A major reason that cruisers come here is that it's the furthest north point in Belize from which you can check out. It's easy to do, but be sure to bring correct change ($15 BZ for Immigrations & $34 BZ for Customs) as they don't seem to be able to make change. There's also a large grocery store where you can buy lots of products, but be prepared for sticker shock...A small box of Wheat Thins was $7.50 US! Local products are much cheaper. The Green House has good fresh produce and Lena's has stocks of good local sausage. BC's serves great bar food and the Blue Water Grill served up a wonderful dinner. The reason that I'm including this info is that I've been discovering that other cruisers are actually reading my reports and referencing them! Scary!!!
There's also a cut in the reef which you can use in settled weather. The cut is about 150' wide and is 300' long and is about 8' deep. Just on the inside there's another large drying reef which requires that you make a turn once you clear the reef. The sea had been pounding over the reef for days so Sue & I decided to go out in the dinghy and check out the conditions in the cut. Waves come in sets and we entered the cut during a lull. We were about 1/2 way through when the seas started building to over 10' and there were breaking waves around us. Sue was not happy at all and was yelling at me to get her out of there. I was able to quickly swing the dinghy around and when I looked behind I saw a large breaking wave coming straight at us. I opened the throttle of the 15 HP Yamaha all of the way up and we were racing down the face of the wave with it breaking just behind us! Sue yelled and reminded me about the drying reef and as soon as we cleared the inside of the reef I swung hard to the right and watched as the wave broke over the inside reef. Man, that was a 2 ticket ride if I've even been on one!
I decided that there was no way that we could get BlueJacket through the cut so we pick up anchor and moved back to Cay Caulker where the anchorage is smooth and the holding is good. One thing that I have to laugh about is that the Natl' Weather Services forecasts for the area show 10-15 kts and it's been blowing 15-20 kts. I've joked about this in my morning weather synopsis and remind people not to shoot the messenger if their local weather doesn't match the forecast.
It's Sunday as I'm finishing this and we plan to pull around to Long Cay in preparation for going out through the Long Cay cut. It looks like it should be much calmer. Unfortunately this will add 15 miles onto the trip, but that's a lot better than ending up on the reef!
Until our next report from Mexico, this is Geoff & Sue signing off.
Log ID: 341
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