Oceanic Ventures, Inc.
The Strange Chronicles
April 2001
26 April 2001 We ended up with a bucket full of shrimp. Half were this jumbo size. After three days of eating they're all gone and we're ready for something else - steak, chicken, sandwich. Even Karen's has had enough shrimp for a day or two.
25 April 2001 Today we move east the suspect group of islands and found 8 - 10 shrimp boats anchored together in a little bay. We anchored, put our dinghy in the water and Rebecca, Lise (off S/V Ayacha) and I headed over to the largest, offshore shrimper. We had a hard time attracting anyone's attention over the roar of pumps and refrigeration motors but a deckhand finally noticed us. Lise, who speaks excellent Spanish, asked if they had any shrimp for sale. The deckhand said they didn't sell shrimp but he'd get the captain for us. The captain explained they had a contract for the boat and couldn't sell shrimp directly. He then asked if we wanted the shrimp for bait or eating. Hearing our "eating" he disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a plastic bag of 2-3 pounds of shrimp as a gift. The shrimp weren't graded so we had quite a variety. The smallest would sell for mediums in the states. By far the largest number were large and several were monsters that would sell only to the fanciest restaurants. We hurried home, popped the heads off, made up a shrimp boil and a red sauce, and are waiting for S/V Ayacha to come over for dinner in a few minutes. Tomorrow, we'll deliver a cake to the 16 young men who work on the boat. Then we'll take our 5 gallon bucket and a bottle of rum and visit one of the less fancy "mom and pop" type boats. We're hoping to return with a full bucket in exchange for the rum and a few dollars
23 April 2001 I hesitate to tell you this story because it's going to make you so jealous. We're still heading East, making short day hops as we work our way into the wind. Every couple of days we pull into a new anchorage and start watching our daily weather faxes for another brief period of light winds. At the last anchorage we kept seeing shrimp boats heading out in the late afternoon and returning in the early morning. We ran around the small group of mangrove islands in our dinghy trying to find them but out luck. The second morning I got up with a cup of coffee, turned on the RADAR and plotted their courses. Turns out they passed to the North of our group of islands and continued on for another ten miles or so. A second cup of coffee and a bit of chart work revealed their probably location.