New catamaran cruisers serve up sailing and diving adventure in Belize's pristine outer atolls

By Lee Carlson

James Rexroad

Grueling research: Author Lee Carlson offshore of Carrie Bow Caye

IT'S 1400 HOURS with wind out of the northeast at 30 knots, and we're two miles west of the barrier reef off the coast of Belize. I stand at the starboard rail, peering through the driving rain, watching for coral heads as our catamaran slices through the water at nine knots. "Seven feet, six feet, five, four..." Neil calls out readings from the depth sounder.

The boat draws four feet. I watch white sand, eel grass, and soft coral speed by below and imagine the keel just inches from the bottom. I search the water ahead for a clue, but the mottled gray sky reflects on the silvery surface of the ocean, making it nearly impossible to read the water. The hand-drawn charts of the Belize coast from the pages of Freya Rauscher's Cruising Guide to Belize and Mexico's Caribbean Coast are the best we could find—undeveloped countries typically don't have the resources to publish charts of their own—and show only one obstacle: a shallow sandbar that we should be able to clear. Even so, I tighten my grip on the metal shroud; it's a roll of the dice, since our mast is the highest point in sight and thus a perfect lightning rod in this squall. Goff's Caye, a dark green mangrove island a quarter-mile to our south, is only a low mound rising up from the water. We're trailing jumper cables over the side as grounding wires, just in case.

These kinds of navigational challenges are precisely what's exhilarating about sailing in Belize. Formerly a British colony (English is the official language) and once ruled by the Maya, the Massachusetts-size country is located just south of Mexico and east of Guatemala on Central America's Caribbean coast. Most of the country's 250,000 permanent residents live in a few cities and towns along the coast and work as fishermen, loggers, farmers, and in the tourism industry. Tourism has been the mainstay of the economy since the early 1980s; last year 107,000 peoplecame to Belize to dive, fish, and visit the Mayan ruins of the inland jungles.

The six of us—Neil, a wilderness EMT from Steamboat Springs, Colorado; Connie and Scott, a couple from Boston; Belinda, my wife; James, our photographer; and I—are one of the first groups to charter a bareboat catamaran along the Belize Barrier Reef, the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere, 12 nautical miles offshore, and to the outer atolls, another 30 miles beyond. The waters off Belize were once the domain of pirates in search of Spanish galleon gold and are now home to some of the finest scuba sites in the world, including the famous Blue Hole, a cavernous sinkhole that measures 1,000 feet across and 480 feet deep. But until now, diving Belize meant spending a week aboard a dive boat with 20 to 30 other people or staying at a land-based resort and shuttling back and forth to dive sites hours away. So when I learned last spring that Belize's first bareboat charter company, TMM, with a head office based on the British Virgin Island of Tortola, had recently begun renting catamarans outfitted with dive compressors, I felt compelled to investigate.

Big cruising cats with sleeping cabins like Katkandu, the 42-foot catamaran we chartered, built by the French company Fountaine Pajot, are a new phenomenon in the sailing world. They've been available as bareboats—sailboats chartered sans crews—only in the last few years. Hence, like most people, we'd never sailed one. Our group's sailing experience ranged from saltwater-in-the-veins (I'm a former private yacht captain) to landlubber. But with these boats you need less expertise than you do for a monohull: They're relatively easy to handle, don't heel, and—as we would discover—can skim through amazingly shallow water (see "The Bareboat Way of Knowledge").

Erring on the side of caution, TMM restricts bareboaters to sailing within the reef; if a client damages a boat on an offshore atoll, it could be months before the weather allows a salvage vessel to recover it. But if you bring one of TMM's local captains as a pilot, you've got free rein to explore all of Belize's cruising grounds. Because this was precisely the point of our trip, we enlisted the services of Freddy Waight, a Belizean captain and dive master who's been sailing these waters for the last 30 years. Our tentative route left from Ambergris Caye, where TMM's Belize office is located, in the far northeastern corner of the country, some 16 nautical miles south of the Mexican border and 25 nautical miles offshore from Belize City. From there we planned to sail in a wide circle east to the outer coral atolls (which range in size from tiny spits of land that disappear during a storm to bigger islands with dive resorts); southwest to tiny Carrie Bow Caye, about 70 nautical miles south of Ambergris on the Belize Reef; and then north again to Ambergris—about 200 nautical miles in all.

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