Livingston, Guatemala - The mouth of the Rio Dulce

Sunday, June 23, 2002

015-49.200 N
088-45.000 W

Ahoy from Livingston, Guatemala, which is at the mouth of the beautiful Rio Dulce. We departed for Livingston at 06:00 this morning to make use of the full moon high tide. The sand bar at the mouth of the Rio Dulce is 1/2 a mile wide and has a controlling depth of about 5.5-6.0'. Since BlueJacket draws 5'2", I wanted to have all the headroom that I could get. High tide was at 06:34, with a 2.0' tide. We arrived at the bar at 07:35 and crossed seeing no less that 8.0'. A piece of cake!

During the previous might we had line after line of heavy duty squalls move through. I must admit that after the blow at the West End of Roatan, I'm a bit gun shy of squalls. These were accompanied by a lot of lightening, and at several points I really wondered if we were going to get hit as the wind instruments were going crazy and I thought that it might have been due to electrical discharges at the top of the mast. Happily we weren't struck, but there were lots of close hits.

Livingston is a port of entry for Guatemala and we had been told to expect a prompt visit from officials to the boat to inspect it & clear us in. About 3 hours later they showed up, but in the mean time we had pancakes for breakfast and I pickled the water maker in preparation for leaving the boat.

Livingston is a quaint town, which seems makes its money from European visitors. Personally I can't imagine coming here as there doesn't seem to be much to do and the water is very cloudy with runoff from the Rio Dulce. Lots of restaurants which were reasonable, but not cheap.

The landscape here is beautiful. About a mile from the anchorage in front of the town the mountains start. These are relatively low, about 300-500' and have nice long slopes which are covered with trees. The Rio Dulce cuts right through these, and from here you can see sheer 300' cliffs dropping straight down to the river. We've been told that the trip up the Rio Dulce is stunning, and we can't wait to transit it, which we'll do tomorrow.

Well, another squall just went through which dropped visibility down to a hundred feet or so for 15 minutes. Only 22 kts of wind. Phew! I watched it one come on radar, and I knew that we were going to get doused. That's it from here. Until tomorrow's report from the other end of the Rio Dulce! 

Log ID: 265