SV Sine Timore: All shook up!

Estero Jaltepeque, El Salvador

Still just hanging around in El Salvador...

Over the last week or so, we have managed to get away from the boat for a few days.

First, along with another cruising couple (Dennis and Caroline on SV Aztec), we took a little mini-break into the city of San Salvador. We stayed at a different hotel this time as our usual haunt was booked up. Nice location, just a 1/2 block behind one of the upscale malls in the city. It was interesting to see all the Christmas decorations and familiar holiday shopping chaos.

Around 11PM on our fist night at the hotel (Dec 12th), we were treated to our very first experience with an earthquake. The epicenter was just offshore from where the boat is, but we felt it pretty good in the city. It was a relatively gentle shake, lasting only a minute or so, and no damage was done. Upon our return to the boat a few days later, no-one there apparently noticed anything at all.

While in town, we made our usual pilgrimage to the local malls, hardware and grocery stores, etc. to stock up on some much-needed supplies - quite a challenge to get all of our purchases and five people into the taxi for the ride back to the estuary,

Christmas Gridlock

Yesterday, we hired a guide to take us on a day trip to see some the eastern part of the country, which we had not seen before. Among other places, we visited another estuary at Puerto El Triunfo - no cruising yachts here - just fishing boats and local pangas. Looks like a pretty cool place though.

We continued on to various small towns at some of the higher elevations inland. With village names like "California" and "Berlin", it was like a trip around the world. We saw some beautiful country with great vistas and some impressive, somewhat active, volcanos, and had lunch at a great restaurant boasting a much cooler climate - coffee is a big crop at these higher altitudes.

Along the way, we saw lots of roadside stands selling whatever the local produce might be, from bananas and plantains to fresh turkeys and iguanas (it is almost Christmas after all).

Local transportation

Meanwhile, back in the estuary, life goes on. We spend most of our time reading, swimming in one pool or another, visiting with other yachhties (three new boats came in this week and one left), and generally not much of anything constructive. Just in front of Lou and Lynn's home, we watched the local kids playing baseball - brings back a lot of memories for us.

The one project that I accomplished since the last post was with the ailing freezer. I managed to find the offending fan, get it cleaned up somewhat and put back together. So far it is working well. As for our battery situation, we are now operating with a reduced house bank of 4 batteries instead of 6. This means we have less overall capacity but with the 2 weaker batteries out of the circuit, it is holding voltages much better now. Since this is working so well, I am going to leave it this way for the foreseeable future - I just can't justify replacing these batteries when 4 of them seem to be working almost like new.

Our tentative plan right now is to leave here between Christmas and New Years, but as usual, our plans are anything but bankable.