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Saturday, 2/1 - Friday, 2/7/97
Saturday dawned with me on the foredeck admiring the Grenada landscape.
Alex popped out from down below and called my name. As I turned towards Alex, I got slammed in the chest with a snowball! My mind simply could not comprehend how this came to be. Alex casually tossed me my own snowball and offered his butt as a target. I wound up and hit him square in the calf. I never did have much of an arm. It seems Alex had taken to defrosting the freezer and had used the scrapings as impromptu projectiles. And who says we can't empathize with our snowbound friends back north?
We left Grenada around 4 PM and figured we would get to Isla de Margarita off the coast of Venezuela at around 10 AM the next
morning. We plotted our course and set off with the wind about 120 degrees off the starboard quarter. We had around 120 miles and only one real hazard to our plot.
We would be on the lookout for Isla de Testogos at around 3 AM in the morning. Right after we passed these little islands, we would change course and head almost due West. It got real shallow right after we made the turn. It got down to about 5 meters depth. Seeing as we draw 2.5 meters, we hoped our charts were correct. They were and on my watch we shot by the shallow area and headed up to Margarita.
We arrived off Porlamar at around 7 AM. From the ocean, all you see is a bunch of rather grand looking hi-rises.
We were soon to find that the elegant skyline hide a number of surprises at ground level. We watched the depth meter tick down to around 3 meters and dropped the anchor. It stuck hard on the first try and we shut down the engine.
After tidying up a bit, we headed off to see about clearing customs.
On the beach, we found some friends that we had first seen in Antigua. Tom, Farmer, and Dan off the 65 foot motor yacht Ocean Bound were also looking to clear in. One problem for us though. We didn't know that you needed a visa in advance for Venezuela if you arrived by boat. If you arrived by plane, you can get one when you arrive. We were out of luck, but still decided to walk into town and double check. As we walked with the guys off of Ocean Bound, it began to pour. I mean huge, splattering raindrops. We took refuge and waited for the rain to clear.
Walking from the marina (actually just a decrepit bunch of docks) we saw a huge hotel that had closed because of a
fire. They just shut it down because it was not insured.
From the sea it looked very elegant, but up close it was a run down shell. This was to become a common sight as walked farther into town. There were all of these half-finished hotels surrounded by slums. As we walked we were approached by a number of men asking if we wanted to exchange US dollars for Venezuelan Bolivars. The Bolivar has dropped rapidly in relation to the US dollar. When our cruising guide was written in 1994, you would get 75 Bolivars per US. When we got there, the rate was 475 Bolivars per US. Our US dollar certainly went far as everything was incredibly low priced compared to the Caribbean.
We ended up in the main part of town and stopped for a couple of beers at “Cheers", a franchise from the USA.
The beers were cold and only cost about the equivalent of 65 cents US! We headed back to the boat and the cab ride cost us 900 Bolivars (about $2 US). We got out and walked over to a beach restaurant and ordered a burger.
As the week went on, we ran into the center of town a couple of times to make phone calls. You have to buy a 5000
Bolivar phone card that lasts about 3 minutes per call to the US. We ran through a stack of them in record time. We made friends with a woman named Norma who runs a travel agency in town. She let
us use her phone line to get a high-speed connection back to the states to get our Email. It became quite a thrill to connect at 19200 instead of our usual 4800 baud over the cell phone. Much cheaper
also.
We just found out we got a little blurb in SAIL magazine! We also had an article in Soundings! Our Email has jumped
immensely. We received about 50 mails in one day.
Since we had brought the laptop in from the boat, Bill, Alex, and I stopped to read our emails at a little cafe. We had half the restaurant staff reading everything over our shoulder as we laughed and caught up with our friends and family through the Email we had just received.
Jeff Johnson 1997
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