Pictures

This post is dedicated to posting pictures.   These were taken on our beach trip as well as when we took our dinghies down the estuary to a restaurant.  Here are some of the things we are seeing here on a daily basis.  I have been terribly lazy about this blog, and I hope to start doing better. 


This is me standing in front of a bathroomat a estuary restaurant.  It wa jsut a structure built around a hole leading into the estuary.

 When you go to the market to buy crabs, this is how they come - tied together in a bundle.

Here are our friends pulling up to the estuary restaurant in their dinghy.

 This is an estuary restaurant.  They pretty much only serve fried fish and shrimp, but it is great. 

Here are our friends coming through a clearing in the mangroves.

This is a harbor for fishing boats.  There are all different kinds and sizes.

 Here is dinner at an estuary restaurant - friend fish, shrimps, rice, and pico de gallo.

This is our friends and Mike eating dinner at the beach house we all stayed at last week.

Here we are at the estuary restaurant after our dinghy trip through the jungle mangroves.  Our friend Santos led the way.

Here is a gecko.  They are every where,  I would not mind one on the boat, we would never have a bug problem.

IF you want coconuts, you must pay someone a dollar to climb up and get some.

Here are  kids playing checkers on the streets here in El Salvador.  Things got pretty heated, one kid was chased away.  Who knew checkers could be so cut throat!

Here are two of the local canoes - one is a dugout.  They are both in use.

Here is a woman canoeing her way down the estuary.  We see her almost daily, delivering laundry.

Here are locals on their way down the estuary.  People here are very friendly.

Mangroves. 

This is our anchorage.  Magda Jean is the first boat on the right.

Here is where Mike and I slept at the beach house.  The beds had mosquito netting over them.

Enruique, our chef at the beach house.  Here he was referred to as the "cook boy."  He was an excellent chef.

An oxcart in the middle of the road.  A new kind of traffic jam. 

Fishing pangas at rest.

A road side restaurant on our way to the beach house.  Our driver, Ernesto, took us here,  The food was wonderful, the beer was cold.  They did all the cooing over wood fires.

Road cows!

A panga at sunset - I took this off my boat.

Here is an estuary structure with people waving to us as we went by.

Ok, that is it for today.  Our plan for today is to deliver one of our old solar panels to a family living on an island near here - a place with no electricity or running water.  Earlier we had a fund raiser (when all the cruisers were still here) and bought and installed water purifiers for each family on the island.  I am also dropping off some material to have a couple of dresses made for me at a grand total of ten dollars per.  The fabric was also extremely inexpensive.  I am looking forward to looking good!

Most everyone has gone from here, leaving only about four boats.  Some of the people have sailed south to Costa Rica and Panama, or back to Mexico, and others have left their boats here and are back in the US or Canada for the summer.  We plan to be here for another couple of months.  It is a good place to base some further exploration of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras, as well as Belize.  It was hard to see some people leave - this is the first place I felt like I really got to know some of these people and I hope we meet up somewhere later.  A number of them plan to go through the canal to the Caribbean - our plan of course is to turn right at the canal and head off to the Marquesas and the south pacific.  It was a great group of people while it lastetd.  Now we are down to about four boats, luckily we like them all.  I suppose people will be coming and going throughout the summer.  We will spend the fall and  winter in Costa Rica and Panama.  But all these plans could change at any moment. 

Our new rain catching system works well.  We just have to remember to keep things really clean, or we could be drinking bird poop!

  "Any damn fool can navigate the world sober.  It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk."  (Sir Francis Chichester)