As the intruders came down the steps it appeared that they injured Dan with a machete, possibly to his side. I heard him say "what the hell" as 4 men with straight-bladed machetes came into the cockpit and forced Dan back down the steps from the main hatch. At 8:30 pm we were making a salad for dinner, and we heard a sound of something knocking into the hull.ĭan headed up to the cockpit to identify the sound, with me following right behind him. We washed with a sponge bath and Dan wrapped a towel around himself. We preferred calmer music and went into our cabin below to hear our own classical music. We could not identify the source of the music. There was loud music with electronic bass coming from the north side of the river. When Dan was done, we enjoyed the clouds of the sunset. I stopped around 6:30 pm while Dan put things away in the starboard locker where he had been working (lines, life jackets, fenders, etc.). Dan was in the starboard cockpit locker fixing corroded connections to the starter motor, and I scrubbed the green growth on the boat bottom using the dinghy. We motored to this location on Friday afternoon (August 8) from the El Relleno Marina (10-15 minutes away). “On Saturday Augwe were anchored in the middle of Monkey Bay on our sailboat, Sunday's Child. Here is Nancy Dryden’s account of the attack: Rio Dulce Piracy Incident One: August 9, 2008ĭaniel Dryden is murdered aboard Sunday’s Child. Before we go further, let’s examine two first-hand reports of two separate incidents on Guatemala’s Rio Dulce during hurricane season 2008: one of piracy and murder and, another of piracy and aggravated assault. Our incredible 2008 crime experiences in Guatemala finally brought this issue to a head. Here and now, I aim to shine a bright spotlight on that damn "shark" of a topic, show him to you from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, and be done with it. The issue of crime and cruising keeps circling in the shadows of my writing efforts like a big Bull Shark, stalking the fringes of my reports of happy cruising. More importantly, this report will satisfy in earnest an unfulfilled, nagging responsibility to my fellow cruisers out here, and also those still dreaming of cruising one day in the future. By doing a thorough job and getting this very unpleasant task out of the way once and for all, the crime subject will not seep through the cracks of otherwise fun trip logs in the future. The best part: after this report I will never have to mention the overall subject of crime and cruising again. It’s long overdue if the truth is to be told. In this edition, I am diving head-first into a “thorny patch” surely to be skinned-up in the end, but so be it. Not just bland statistics mind you, but also a look at how different cruisers behave, especially when emotions and conflicting opinions clash. It’s time for an update, this time solely about cruising and crime. Melissa and I have now been all the way around the entire Caribbean and are back in U.S. Just when I thought I had a pretty good feel for the crime and cruising topic, we came upon Guatemala in 2008. It’s a lot like after-dinner cigar smokers having a great time when all of a sudden an oncologist sits down and joins in the conversation: the proverbial party pooper.īack in 2006, while preparing to enter the danger zone of Venezuelan waters for the first time, I wrote about being surprised to discover that the cruising community is so divided in the way they cope with challenges of entering locales that present significantly higher risks to cruisers. Whenever I encounter a strong opposing opinion, it challenges me to step back and examine my beliefs in earnest. I guess that has happened to all of us at one time or another. Some folks get defensive and heated, or at a minimum become uncomfortable when an opinion different from theirs is strongly voiced. People feel very strongly about the issue and it can be just as dicey as politics and religion. I generally avoid the topic of crime and cruising in our trip logs. The last time I mentioned crime and cruising prominently in a trip report was two years ago in 2006.
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