Exploring the Country

The arrival of our boat freed us, when we wished, from our new-found shores and gave us new worlds to explore. The Century was a roomy, sea-kindly boat, ideal for family day trips.

British Honduras’ barrier reef is the longest in the hemisphere and second longest in the world (after Australia’s reef). It is studded with dozens of islands that seem to be waiting for a travel agent to photograph them. In the Fifties the larger ones had fishing villages. Some small cayes (pronounced keys) held lighthouses and two or three simple frame houses for the lighthouse keeper and his family. Most were uninhabited patches of fine coral sand studded with coconut palms. The sparse grass and bushes on the cayes, like the palms, had grown from seeds or nuts washed ashore by the constant action of the waves. We found, to our surprise, that peaceful as the small cayes looked, they were noisy places. Constant winds crackled through the palm fronds with a sound like rain and the waves rasped on the sandy shores.

The oceans were Bucher’s home. He had joined the Navy during World War II. After a diving accident caused permanent damage to one ear, he left the Navy. He then entered the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. On graduation he was given a berth as second mate, rather than as third, on one of the freighters supplying war materiel and food to the beleaguered United Kingdom. He spent five years at sea, most of them on the North Atlantic run. One reason we left Atlanta after settling there at the war’s end was that Bucher could not live out of sight of blue water.

Alex and Carli had been brought up on boats so 1) safety rules were ingrained, and 2) the Captain’s word was law to them. They might “discuss” matters of disagreement with their parents at home, but at sea both obeyed instantly. There was no argument over the edict that they wear their life jackets at sea.

 

Bucher brought the first face masks, fins, and snorkels ever seen in Belize. Our forays with them in Sarasota’s cloudy waters had not prepared us for the crystalline world of the tropical reef. Multicolored fish darted past faster than we could memorize their shades and shapes to look them up in our books at home.

I swam with a finger hooked into the straps of Carli’s life-vest while she paddled and peered at the busy piscine life in the water below her. Most of the time she was content to play in the shallows or on the sand, searching for shells, or more excitingly for her “friends,” fiddler or hermit crabs.

Alex was more adventurous. Peering below the surface from his floating perch he learned to identify each kind of fish and to see how differently they behaved. In places the reef came right up to the sands and water was wading depth, so he could feel like a part of the strange marine world.

“What’s that thing waving from a cave,” Alex asked, sputtering as he pulled his mask aside. Bucher dove to investigate and returned with a thrashing lobster.

 

Ford Young, who with his wife Callie became close friends, frequently joined us on our trips to the cayes. Ford was an enthusiastic photographer, so, soon after we all began exploring the reef, he bought an underwater camera. Callie, Bucher, and I thought his pictures were exceptionally good, but Ford was not satisfied with them. He sent an envelope of his best photographs of fish and the reef to The National Geographic for criticism and suggestions. They wrote back saying that his pictures were better than theirs and asking, “Please tell us what you are doing.”

One sunny afternoon when we were snorkeling in shallow water near the reef, Ford called to me and said, “Kate, there’s something I think you would enjoy seeing in a cave down there.” We were in an area where two or three long ridges of coral, pitted with small openings, stretched toward the nearby sandy caye in water of wading depth.

I promptly replaced my mask and ducked beneath the wind-ruffled water to search the coral. Almost immediately I found myself face-to-mask with a wary Moray Eel. Apparently I unsettled him as much as he did me. The sinister head with its gaping teeth withdrew into the darkness of the cave as rapidly as I paddled out of its way. Ford roared with laughter as I surfaced sputtering with salt water and fury.

 

Bucher had brought our spinning tackle to British Honduras with us, so one bright weekend we decided to try the bonefishing. Bucher was amazed to see the multitudes of bonefish that inhabited grassy flats inside the reef. “Sport fishermen travel half way around the world to find concentrations of bonefish one-tenth as great as these,” he marveled.

One afternoon on the bonefish flats I tired of fishing and decided to take Carli back to the boat, which was rocking gently at anchor a few dozen yards away. Our guide, a handsome young British Honduran, Bert Foreman, who had an encyclopedic understanding of the waters and its denizens, waded back with us. Suddenly Bert leaned down, made a quick grab, and stood up holding by its tail a squirming fish a couple of feet long.

“What is that?” I asked him.

“Just a Nurse Shark,” Bert replied, as he leaned over and quickly pulled a second, smaller one out of the water.

This Michigan girl was reluctant to share her wading area with sharks, and appalled that her innocent baby was literally toe-to-jowl with the fish of evil reputation. I snatched Carli up into my arms. Obviously I remained at risk; Bert had no more spare arms to catch other lurkers-of-the-shallows.

I danced through the water as quickly as I could, leaving Bert laughing behind me, tossed Carli unceremoniously over the gunwale into the Century, and crawled aboard myself with more speed than grace.

 

On windy days when waves were too high to make either boating or swimming a pleasure, we often took the boat up the Belize River. Technically, the branch that bisected the city was the Haulover Creek. It flowed south from the main river just before the latter debouched into the sea a few miles from Belize.

Alex and Carli were as charmed as Bucher and I at moving slowly up the river from the wharf, seeing our adopted city from an unaccustomed perspective. Riverfront homes with verandas overlooking the water alternated with run-down warehouses. Not far from the city, the ruler-straight Burdon Canal ran south from the Haulover to connect through lagoons with the Sibun River down the coast. Trees overhung the river so that in narrow spots one seemed to be moving through a dappled green tunnel.

We often cast or trolled for fish during these river runs. Sometimes we even caught them. The noisiness of our family group probably scared off more fish than our bait attracted.

 

One day Carli was “fishing,” a procedure that involved my holding a rod, with or without her companion grasp. A Frigate Bird, attracted by her lure, dove and devoured it. We barely saw what was happening until the massive bird soared upward and Carli’s reel began humming. Bucher, white-faced, leaped to the stern of the boat and cut the line with a knife that appeared as if by magic in his hand.

Carli was screaming with excitement, “I caught a bird. I caught a bird.”

Bucher quietly remarked to me, “All I could think of was one of the children without an eye if he had spit out that plug.”