Lighthouse Reef 2004

Tuesday, March 9, 2004

017-11.700 N
087-35.940 W

Ahoy from the Lighthouse Reef off of Belize!

We actually made it out the the atolls! Yeah! More on that in a bit. I keep forgetting to mention that before we left the Rio Dulce that I uploaded a who series of photos from Guatemala. They're at www.geoffschultz.org in the "2004 Sailing" section. There are some shots from the Highlands and Antigua that I really like.

Anyhow, we left the Bluefield Range Sunday morning at about 8:30. We had 2 choices on how to pass through the reef. We could either go out the cut at Rendezvous cay (a cay is an island and is just a different spelling of "key", as in FL Keys) or to go out the main ship channel which was 6 miles to the N. The later is much more open and provided a better angle for sailing, but it would take a solid hour to get there. The cut at Rendezvous is narrow and has lots of coral heads requiring good light, which meant that we couldn't leave for and hour or better...Sigh...which to choose. We chose the ship channel, which is known as English Channel.

Just after getting out of the reef at the Bluefield Range I glanced at the engine controls and saw that the temperature gauge was pegged. There was plenty of water coming out of the exhaust, so there was some other problem. I shut down the engine and threw up the sails and then tried to determine what the problem was. The engine was so hot that I couldn't really check for much. We sailed to English Channel and then tacked our way down it. That was kind of exciting as there was a large freighter working it's way down the channel towards us. Luckily we cleared the channel just before it did. I certainly didn't want to insist upon my rights!

After that we headed towards Turneffe island, and of course the wind was switching from NE to ESE as we went, turning the sail from a pleasant beam reach to a close hauled, rail in the water sail. But the seas were calm and the wind wasn't too high. The engine had cooled sufficiently by then to look at it. I couldn't find anything wrong, so I decided to swap out the thermostat. It was 7 years old, and I had 2 spares, so this would be a good thing all around. The coolant was also very low, and I couldn't tell what had happened to it, so I topped that off. I fired the engine up and everything seemed fine. Not wanting to tempt fate, I shut it down so that it would be cool when we were taking the sails down and anchoring.

We sailed right up to the anchorage, fired up the engine so that we could keep the boat into the wind while dropping the sails, and anchored in a nice sand hole. No problems with the engine. I kept it running to get it hot, and after a while I saw coolant squirting from a small hose that feeds the turbo. Mark, from Brandy, and I had been moving that hose around the other day when we were working on the alternator and that must have weakened it enough to cause it to break. I replaced the hose and all is well.

Our good friends, Gene and Brenda from Queen Mary, were anchored next to us and we went over for a couple of hours in the PM and then they came over for sunset cocktails. It was great to catch up with them. We had spent a lot of time with them out at Lighthouse Reef last year. They were on their way to Honduras and pulled out of the anchorage at around 3 AM.

The next day we had a nice, close hauled, sail from Turneffe to Lighthouse Reef. The Northstar GPS is down, and it was a bit challenging to navigate around the island to the E side with only a handheld unit. But we got there without problems and anchored near Brandy, who had arrived the day before. They came over in the evening and we had a good time catching up.

Today it's off to dive, dive, dive! Reports will probably slow down now as we're going to be here for a while.

-- Geoff & Sue
Log ID: 465