January 2005 -- Back in Venezuela

January 2005-- Back to Venezuela and the boat. This is the nicest time of the year in Puerto la Cruz, with cooler nights and comfortable daytime temperatures. What a treat to wake up every day to blue skies and sunshine!

February -- we took the high-speed ferry to Isla Margarita to meet Cliff's sister Evelyn and her son Andrew, who joined us for a week on the boat. They came on a non-stop charter flight from Toronto to Margarita, a convenient and inexpensive way to get to Venezuela. Their visit sped by with a few laid-back days by the hotel pool and a couple of days cruising the nearby islands.
We enjoyed sharing Andrew's last days of freedom before he began his first job as a graduate civil engineer.

Later in the month, Orma's sister Sherilyn and her husband, David, came for a first visit to Venezuela. We put them to work, acclimatized them to the weather, then left the dock again for a few days of island-hopping. Sherilyn thought the beads
were a bargain when boat vendors came visiting. It looks like the boat vendors are getting the last laugh!














Feb. 27 --We celebrated Orma's birthday with a great party on the dock. She shared the day with another birthday girl, a 13-year old cruiser and her teen-age friends, and with the Venezuelan wife of a cruiser who was having a family party. There were about 60 of us altogether, and it was great fun. The Venezuelans really know how to party and are teriffic dancers, so we had salsa and marengue lessons and partied until the wee hours (like 10:00, which is late for cruisers!)

March 2005 -- we were privileged to be able to participate again in a medical mission at Hospital Razetti, where we cleaned instruments, ran errands, and mopped floors while observing miracle operations repairing little faces deformed from birth. Our taxi driver refused to take payment for our three 7:00am trips to the hospital, stating that it was his "servicio a Dios" to drive us there.

March brought to a sad ending to a beautiful boat and the honeymoon of a Spanish couple we met at the dock, whose five-month-old, million-dollar 54-ft Amiel was wrecked on a reef at Tortuga. The couple and their dog were rescued, but much of their stuff was "salvaged" (stolen) and they were treated very badly by the locals, the Venezuelan authorities, and the insurance company. Their disaster underlines two cardinal rules of cruising: NEVER arrive after dark at your destination, and NEVER rely on your electronic charts to help you avoid reefs.

Easter week is party time in Venezuela, and Maremares was full to the brim with vacationing families and power boaters. A touch of carnival wound its way through the grounds each day during the week. On Easter Sunday we were up before dawn to see the sunrise with our church family at a lovely home on the canals.(photo) We enjoyed a potluck brunch, then spent the afternoon walking it off along the public beach, watching all the families who were out making the most of the beautiful weather and the holiday weekend. We asked one Venezuelan how they celebrate Easter Sunday and he said they go to the beach during the day and at night they make an effigy of Judas and hang and burn him in the streets. How sad that they concentrate more on Judas than Jesus on resurrection Sunday.


All too soon it was time to have Skylark hauled out of the water and put in a high-security storage yard for the summer. This is always a big job, made more difficult because some things can't be done until the boat is out of the water, and there is about one hour during which you can do them under the impatient supervision of the travelift operator. In that short hour, Cliff had to remove the injectors and dismantle the steering system to remove parts we were bringing home for servicing, as well as do the routine jobs like checking throughhulls, draining water lines, etc. We were very thankful to fall into bed at the apartment of friends John and Nora Durham when the job was completed before flying out the next day.

We arranged our flights via Aeropostal to allow us a sidetrip to Ecuador from Caracas before we flew to Miami and Vancouver. The next entry describes our ten days in Equador.