“Breaking up is hard to do…”

And so is leaving Roatan Dive and Yacht Club, especially the power, cable TV, wireless internet, and fresh water! Jeanie especially misses the air conditioning the 30 Amp inlets provide. We called this ‘home’ for 6 weeks and it was a very convenient location. There is a rumor that a new owner is on the way. Changes are in the winds, I’m sure!

Our next move was just outside to French Cay Harbor where our view to the West is the town of French Harbor and our Easterly view is toward Fantasy Island. Yes, there really is a Fantasy Island; it caters to Skin and SCUBA divers of all ages. It and another resort Cocoa View to its East across a small channel have some of the most beautiful reef diving available right off their front doors! Besides diving on Fantasy’s reef, cruisers can enjoy the full run of Fantasy Islands’ amenities, which include wireless internet, gorgeous pool and beach showers and groomed beaches. The bar is open as is the dinning room. They’re just very pricey. $25.00 per person for an all you can eat lunch and $2.00 for a 6 oz Coke and $6.00 for a domestic beer are not in most cruisers budgets! Being able to rinse the salt off with the poolside showers; Priceless! Moreover, it sure makes our water supply last longer!

Speaking of water, our water maker is doing a great job of keeping up with our water consumption. I just love not having to haul water! We run it about 6 hours a day, and that keeps us in all the showers and dishwashing we care to do!

Catching fish is still a mystery to me. I’ve only caught one little Yellow Tailed Snapper that was about 4 bites. I saved part of him for bait and that afternoon, I actually was fishing, using more fish for bait than I had saved for dinner… didn’t catch a thing!

Jonesville and Hole-in -the -Wall.

Sunday Jan 16th we pulled the anchor in French Cay Harbor and bid ‘Adios’ to Fantasy Island. Next stop about five miles up the coast to do a little exploring of Jonesville’s little town. First stop was Hole-in-the-Wall for all you can eat steak and lobster, mashed potatoes, coleslaw and beans! Did I forget homemade rye bread and lemon bars for desert! Yummy! All this for only $20.00/person! I may not have to eat for 2 days!

While I’m on the subject of food, we’re going to try to see if we can avoid any food purchases for the next 2 weeks. We stocked up pretty well at Eldon’s Market on Saturday just before we left. The only thing we forgot was carrots, but Jeanie still thinks we can go the distance even without them. Oops, just found a couple items in a tienda in Jonesville, but to our credit, didn’t buy carrots!

The other thing that was a draw for Jonesville was the promise of wireless internet at our boat! Something we haven’t enjoyed since Mario’s Marina clear back in November. The trick is that in order for a good connection, we had to anchor in a direct line between Woodside Marina and the house directly across the bight. This put us right next to a floating B&B. Not a bed and breakfast, but a bar and brothel, or at least that’s what we were told. We’re not even sure it’s floating, but the lower ½ is a ferro-cement boat. Talk about your ‘highest and best use’!

Between the loud music, a slow wireless connection, and the promise of some nasty weather with possible late night anchor drills, and Oh, did I mention that there wasn’t going to be a Super Bowl party in English there either! (Watching football with Spanish announcers sucks) We decided to head back to French Cay Harbor after only about a week. All in all, a very short stay for the Oasis crew!

We managed to wrangle an invitation to watch the American Icon that is the Super Bowl game at Tim Williams of ‘Sound Spirit’s house. It overlooks the back of Fantasy Island and looks East toward Coco View Resort. His boat is moored to his boat-house in one of the few hurricane holes on Roatan right below his house.

Tim graciously agreed to take us to Coxen Hole where we would spend all morning shopping for a lot of back-up supplies and loading the boat up for it’s next jaunt. Tomorrow, we’re going to West End for Valentines Day!

West End Village
Valentines Day ‘08

Have you ever heard, ”Boy, you should ‘a been here yesterday”! Well, the weather the day before our trip turned out to be a flat calm ‘just like we like it’ day! We missed the calm cruising day while shopping. The 3 hour ride to West End was spent rolling down 3 to 4 foot waves the next day. That was more than made up for however as John of Diamond Lil had one hand saving us a mooring and the other awaiting our mooring line! Very shortly we were nice and calm in a gorgeous protected bay! John and Mel are our power-boat friends in a 3850 (38 foot) Bayliner! The four of us enjoyed Valentines dinner of fried Snapper at one of the many nice dinner spots along the beach.

There is “free” wireless internet at most restaurants so we usually go ashore for breakfast every 2 or 3 days. However, at $17.00 for breakfast a couple days before, it’s far from free! It’s also slow, but while we do enjoy a leisurely start to the day, it taxes our laptops batteries. For $10.00/Hr, we can do high-speed internet, but that doesn’t include high-speed typing skills so I’m trying to write on the boat and transfer it to a memory stick. Maybe that way, my eggs don’t get cold!

A word about our “mooring”. This whole area is designated as a protected marine park and they’re especially protective of the ‘Eel grass’ which almost completely covers the whole bottom of the bay. If we and a few hundred others were allowed to anchor anywhere we wanted, it would very soon be ‘clawed’ to pieces. The Roatan Marine Park has installed about a dozen moorings which are no more than large screws into the bottom and have attached a line with a float to it. The screw is somewhat like what is used to hold a mobile home down in tornado country. However, we just need 1, as a MH might use 10 or 12 but I guess you get the similarity. In this fashion, each boat only ‘hurts’ about a 2 foot circle and we’ve held in wind gusts of up to 25 MPH so far.

Since it is a protected marine park, there is no spearing of fish not to mention lobster and crabs. It is OK to fish with a pole however! They must know what a safe bet that is as I’ve not had much luck catching anything worth going to the bother of cleaning yet!! Turtles surface next to our boat some as large as 3 feet in diameter. I guess they’re what’s eating the Eel grass!??

Being on the most western end of land for a long way sure provides us with some spectacular sunsets and we were in a perfect place to watch a total eclipse of the moon as well. The beach restaurants close just after dark so there is very little light pollution to hamper our stargazing. The nights are cool and beautiful. We’re far enough South that the North Star is just above the horizon.

We really loved the West End and planned to stay a long time. However. Feb 27th we got blown out of West End! We watch the weather forecasts on the internet religiously, and the ‘event’ which predicted 25 MPH winds from the West (NOT good for the West End!) was down-graded to 12 to 15 MPH even up to Tue A.M. We felt that our mooring was good and planned to stay longer. However, when the locals start to pull their boats out of the water and the water taxies quit running, it’s definitely time to bail out! Getting outside the reef and the mile or so south to the point was sloppy, but after that we enjoyed a lovely broad reach (down-wind) back to French Cay Harbor.

Even in protected French Cay Harbor. We weren’t able to totally ignore the weather ‘event‘! We had wind gusts to 40 MPH changing from West to North and finally drug our anchor at about midnight! Is there any other time? We had a harrowing night of re-anchoring and anchor watching! Definitely a downside to the cruising life! The next morning, as the wind abated and swung around to the south, we moved into the little bay behind Tim’s house to wait for Oasis weather (flat and calm)!

Our next move will probably be to Old French Harbor to get diesel fuel and propane loaded aboard and then head back to the West End ASAP, We both loved it there. We will probably stay until the next storm drives us out!

I have been busy in my retirement. Among all my other accomplishments, can now be added "Professional Author"! That's right, what follows is the result of my writing skills and the helpful input from Mel on 'Diamond Lil' to send it into Living Aboard magazine. She did say that "they'll print almost anything", but that didn't slow me down at all!
What got me going was just the frustration of having a problem with a new part, the head, that if it was designed properly, wouldn't have broken from the git-go!



Wilcox Crittenden Santa Cruz Head Repair

Given a choice, women and truth be told many men as well, would prefer an electric head to the hand pump variety. Therefore, it was with this in mind I went shopping for the most heavy-duty electric head I could find, when my wife and I were outfitting our retirement cruising boat. Since I was still working, price was not especially important, but dependability was high on the list. I chose a Wilcox over the rest of the offerings. I cannot speak for how the others might have stacked up, but I feel comfortable addressing the one I choose and the Groco head it replaced.

The previous owner had a Groco electric head and over the five years of his cruising, found the water pumping systems to be inadequate as well. He had retrofitted two Jabsco Water Puppy pumps to handle the operations, one to it to pump raw water in, and another to pump the effluent discharge side. It seemed to work OK, just not heavy duty enough to handle the macerator discharge side very well. I know, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it! In retrospect, hindsight being what it is, I should have left it alone! However, I was not feeling comfortable using a Water Puppy as a macerator pump. Moreover, getting back to my dependability issue, I decided to replace the whole head.

Well, it has not quite been two years since I was the proud owner of a brand new head and as you can see, we are poopin’ in a bucket. The head died on a passage from the Rio Dulce region of Guatemala to Roatan, Honduras! Being at sea is never the most convenient time to be doing any repairs, head repairs especially

Upon reaching Roatan, I tried to calling the manufacturer. The first 800 # gave me another, and finally after being on hold a bit, a non 800 #, which after a lot of holding… now I know the “call is important to you“ routine, so why don’t you just answer it! I finally gave up and I tried email next at info.wilcoxcritt…etc. It has been over a week, and still no answer. (I never got one.) What is a person to do? There surely are no parts available in paradise! Dissembling the pump revealed that it had not ingested any gunk, only that the inlet impeller was slipping on the shaft in both directions! Some sort of tricky little grippers built into the inside bore of the impeller were intended to grip the shaft in one rotational direction and not in the other. The idea being that as the motor rotated one direction, the impeller engaged and raw water was drawn in and the other direction, it would ’slip’ on the shaft so that the macerator could evacuate the waste water from the bowl. The whole system relies an a few ridges molded into the bore of an impeller! People, is this any way to build something for the harsh marine environment? I expect that if our boat was used only on weekends and we had a fully stocked chandlery just out-side our front door, I might be tempted to buy a rebuild kit and do the job “right”, but the whole system just stinks, it should have been better engineered and not have broken in the 1st place!

The accompanying pictures show the “fix”. I had an Atwood 500 aerator pump aboard, (Where did I put those Water Puppies?) which I plumbed into the inlet side by using a couple of locally obtained garden hose repair barbs. I’m currently using the original Wilcox motor minus the B/S impeller to pump out the bowl. When and if that motor dies, I will not get another, but will use any brand of locally available macerator pump I can find and modify it to fit.

The head now works much better than it did when new! It’s quieter and pumps cleaner than ever before. Pushing the top of the electric switch fills and cleans the bowl while pushing the bottom, causes the macerator pump to evacuate the bowl.

The lesson is that simplicity and ease of repair along with availability of “local parts” should be foremost in the design of all marine equipment. In addition, when you are in paradise cruising, necessity is the mother of invention!

PS. I did use two hose clamps on all the ‘below the waterline’ connections.

Jim and Jeanie Long are currently living aboard and cruising the N.W. Caribbean aboard their 39’ Lancer motor sailor “Oasis”