Bonacca and El Bight Guanaja Honduras Bay Islands

After a 4-day sail from Jamaica, we arrived at Guanaja in the Honduran Bay Islands shortly at about 8am on Wednesday 5 February.  Our pilot guide is quite clear about the arrival regulations.  Before we could visit any of the many lovely anchorages around the island, we had to anchor off Guanaja’s capital, Bonacca, to check in with customs and immigration.  Even anchoring a mile or so away at El Bight and then dinghying across to Bonacca is, apparently, not permitted.

Anchored off Bonacca looking west towards ‘Alcatraz Cay’ where there is a fuel dock, a propane bottle filling station and an outboard engine service agent

Bonacca is a slightly strange place.  It’s a densely packed town of about 8000 people living on a tiny 100 acre cay.  ‘Strange’ because there is a beautiful, sparsely populated tropical island just ¼ of a mile away!  Many of Bonacca’s buildings are on stilts out over the water and there are small canals running across the cay.  But it has a nice atmosphere and there are no cars or bikes allowed.

Looking east towards Bonacca from our anchorage off the town/cay.  The ferry dock is just right of centre in the bottom picture

As directed by our pilot book, we took the dinghy to close to the ferry dock where we were immediately welcomed with open arms by Handro, a local who said he had spent many years living in New Jersey.  He sounded more like he came from Jamaica and clearly hadn’t returned ‘home’ having made his fortune in the promised land.  In contrast to what we had read, and heard from other cruisers, many of the people we met in Bonacca, including the officials, did not speak English (and our Spanish is very poor).  So, whilst Handro was somewhat over-bearing and charged us more than we would have wished for taking us to the places we needed to find, he did provide a useful translation service.

Bonacca views.  Top: the north side of the cay.  The small green shack, just to the left of the big green house, is the garbage disposal area.  Bags of rubbish left here are transferred to a small panga and
taken to ‘mainland’ Guanaja for disposal.  There is no charge

Bonacca is not a large place and I am sure that, even without Handro’s help, we would have found all we needed.  The streets are small and the only mode of transport is Shank’s Pony.  Immigration was our first stop, a small white building a 5-minute walk (to the right along Main Street) from the ferry quay.  The immigration officer was polite and helpful and just US$10 and about 20 minutes later we were the proud owners of 90-day entry stamps in our passports.  Back to the Port Captain’s office next to the ferry dock and we found that the Port Captain did not want to answer his door (this would become a recurring theme) and, when he did, he didn’t want to deal with us.  ‘Come back after lunch, at 1400’ (or words to that effect).

‘Mainland’ Guanaja, close to Bonacca.  Bonacca, indeed most of Guanaja, was devasted by hurricane Mitch (1998) which sat over the top of the island for 3 days (as hurricane Dorian did to the N Bahamas in 2018).  Bonacca was rebuilt surprisingly quickly after that dreadful event and most of Guanaja’s trees have recovered too, except for in a couple of areas where the locals describe the landscape as having been peeled by the force of the wind and rain.  Interestingly, prior to hurricane Mitch there were no buildings in the area shown in this picture.  Presumably people built here as a temporary measure whilst Bonacca was still recovering and have never returned to the cay

Handro was somewhat embarrassed by this turn of events but showed us around the town instead.  Importantly, he pointed out the local telephone sim card shop, where several members of the Honduran Navy were bluing their payday income on having their phones topped up.  We had quite a long wait in line so, to make things more efficient, Nicky perused the options for buying data.  TIGO seemed to have a better deal than CLARO so she opted for their 5.5Gb package.  Both companies are mentioned in online sailing fora, with no mention of a problem with either.  We later discovered that TIGO’s coverage in Guanaja (and also in Roatan) is far worse than CLARO’s, so much so that we rarely had mobile phone coverage on our local card though our UK Vodafone cards received good reception via CLARO (at some expense it must be said!)  Had there not been a queue we would probably have asked (via Handro) the lady behind the counter to advise us on our purchase.  As it was, with no local funds and the shop offering 20 Lempira to the US$ vice the more usual 23 (bank rate is 24.6), Handro whisked Nicky away to change some cash at a local supermarket [Ed: but the supermarket would not change $20 bills as the bank sets a limit on the number they will handle due to money laundering concerns].

Sim card purchased and tour of the rest of the town (the medical clinic and bank) complete, Handro took his payment and vanished but not before he reminded us to pay the chap who had watched our dinghy(!).  We returned to the bank to change more dollars, only to discover that they would ‘only’ change $200 at a time (and that was an unusually large amount for them).  Just one of the bank tellers spoke English and he was quite apologetic and suggested that we should use the ATM outside.  Clearly the information Nicky had gleaned online that there was no ATM on Guanaja was old news.

Transit to El Bight with Dumbar Rock (with the white dive hotel on top of it) in the distance, close to the entrance to El Bight

Nicky returned ashore after lunch to do battle with the Port Captain.  After hammering on his door at 1402 and having received no response, and having been assured by one of the few English-speaking locals that he was inside (the air-con was running) and that he had been standing outside his office when she had been dropped ashore, she wondered what to do.  The wind was rising and the anchorage off Bonacca didn’t look to be a great place to be in a strong southeasterly wind.  She saw the immigration officer and asked him to call the Port Captain but the latter didn’t pick up his phone.  In the end, she just sat outside the office to wait.  People came and went and shrugged their shoulders.  Eventually a local lady arrived who needed to see him too and, even more eventually, he opened up.  Thereafter the paperwork processing was surprisingly fast and by 1500 we were the proud owners of a 90-day cruising permit – and there was no charge!

Passing Dumbar Rock dive hotel

We immediately set off, around the north of Guanaja to El Bight where there’s a good anchorage, with BV punching heavily into the stiff southeasterly breeze.  Actually, the anchorage to the west of Bonacca is surprisingly sheltered from the sea in this wind direction, as we discovered when we got out of the cay’s lee.

Entry to El Bight.  A reef extends a long way from the Peak Rock headland on
the eastern side of the entrance channel to the bay

Happily, the sun was still high as we made our way into El Bight as we have found our Navionics charts to be really rather poor in the Bay Islands [Ed: in comparison we found them excellent in Cuba].  The pilot book is good though, and the high sun lit up the reef areas, which were pretty much where the book said they would be.  We joined 3 other yachts in the anchorage, which is beautifully sheltered from the trade winds.  Despite the shelter we were still hit by several strong gusts so strong that they bounced the dinghy around on the side of the hull, where we had hung it out of the water when we had arrived.  So, to stop it from blowing around more and possibly doing some damage, we deflated the dinghy and stowed it on deck – a real faff but worth it for a good night’s sleep.

Sunset from El Bight

When we had arrived we had seen on the AIS several OCC yachts (Suzie Too, Flying Low of Poole and a couple of others) anchored off Graham’s Cay.  We had decided that we would go over to see them on Thursday 6 February but before we could move across, they all moved out and on to, we think, Roatan. Maybe catch up with them later in the month.

The barge bringing in building materials to one of the docks in El Bight.  It was a much larger vessel than we had expected to see in the bay

It remained windy and Graham’s Cay looked exposed, whereas we were in a good place in El Bight, so, with Suzie Too, et al gone, and our having no reason to move, we stayed put and did boat chores.  Nicky cleaned the boat inside and out and I fitted the wiring for the OpenCPN computer (a Rasberry Pi) that we had bought in the Chesapeake and had started playing with when we had stayed with Bill and Chris Burry but had got little further.  With the thing wired in and talking to us we spent the afternoon playing with configurations and trying to understand a little more about both the Raspberry Pi and OpenCPN.  Our next task will be to download some more up-to-date charts than we currently have for it and to experiment a lot more.  I also need to make up a better bracket for the monitor – one that will keep the monitor in place at sea!  Part way through our electronic fun and games, we were alerted to the presence of a huge (for the size of the bay) barge, full of building materials, making its way into the bay just in front of us and heading for the dock of the large house on headland.  Well done AIS and OpenCPN’s warning screens!

Left: our wine cellar emptied for cleaning after a wine box, actually wine bag, failure!  Right: all spare bottles were commandeered for the rebottling

Distressingly, we had had no such indication of a similar close encounter in one of our lockers and it was only that evening, when we opened the locker to get out a wine box, that we realised that one of the other boxes had suffered a failure [Ed: well the bag had suffered the failure really] due to chafing whilst on passage from Jamaica.  We caught the leak just in time and managed to rebottle most of the contents.  I guess we’ll be drinking red for the next week or so.

Another lovely sunset – with a glass of red to enjoy it?

Anchored off Bonacca again

On Friday 7 February we woke to a 180 degree different outlook.  The cold front was now close by and the wind was coming from the west – very odd in these islands.  We motored back to anchor off Bonacca to go shopping:  the supply boats come in on Thursday and Friday so these are the days to do the food shopping if you want anything fresh.

Bonacca street scenes

Handro didn’t bounce up to meet us.  Either we had previously paid him far too much and he was still spending what we had given him or we had not paid him enough and he was avoiding us.  [Ed: or perhaps he (and his dinghy-guarding friend) were sleeping off the effects of the arrival of the previous day’s supply boat].  Either way, we left the dinghy where we had before but there was no-one to look after it so we locked it to a convenient set of steps.  Later we found that it had been untied and moved to the limit of its wire strop.  Clearly we had blocked the small canal; on our previous visit presumably Handro’s boat guard had moved the dinghy to facilitate access to the canal.

Shopping for fresh fruit and veg

We found excellent fresh fruit and veg in several small shops, all for a good price and bought plenty.  We also bought maize flour (to make arepas, as shown to us by Karl on Contigo in Port Antonio) and found a small chandlery and a hardware store.  Here we purchased a hand-operated fuel-lift pump to plumb into our generator’s fuel system to make priming the fuel pump easy after a fuel filter change.  All in all, a very successful morning.

With the shopping done and all our purchases stowed away on BV, we left Bonacca and headed east again, this time a bit further than El Bight, to anchor off Graham’s Cay.

Bonacca and El Bight, Guanaja, Honduras Bay Islands