Orinoco River Delta, Manamo River, Venezuela

Written at Prickly Bay, Grenada

Nov. 6, 2006

Hi Folks,

I am finally getting around to sending this first edition of our trip down to the Orinoco Delta and the Manamo River of Venezuela. It was a great trip! We left there and returned to Chaguaramus in Trinidad, then up here to Grenada to meet with Peter and Anne Harris, friends of ours from Northern Ontario. We have been around Hog Island, and Prickly Bay with them and then up to Carriacou and back here. I will be able to send a couple of E-mails in short order over the next few days as we are on Wi Fi while here in Prickly.

All the best,
Aubrey


Log #41g Orinoco River Delta, Manamo River, Venezuela

Hog Island, Grenada

Oct. 30, 2006

When we returned to Chaguaramus on Oct. 3 from Chacachacare, the former leper colony island, we heard that three boats were going down to the Orinoco Delta, to the Manamo River: Good Time Charlie, Amazing Grace, and Graine d'Etoile, leaving on Oct. 5. Could we accompany them? No problem, except we would need to get our yellow fever shots at the local clinic. Bob on Good Time Charlie agreed to wait a day for us, but the other two boats headed out the day before.

The BOCA office gave us a couple of pamphlets of Cruising Notes on the Rio Macareo and Rio Manamo, with a vocabulary list in English, Spanish and Warao (the local tribe in that part of the Delta). These included rough chartlets of the approaches and of the lower reaches of the Manamo, clearly cautioned with the statement, "Not to be used for navigation! This chartlet bears only a vague resemblance to reality." We laid in provisions of food, water and fuel before leaving, as we knew we could not rely on getting anything in the Delta. Also the pamphlets gave suggestions of items used in trading with the natives. We took toothbrushes, toothpaste, thread and needles, scissors, batteries, soaps and shampoos.

I still had no operational digital camera, but we decided to take a trip into Port of Spain, hoping to buy a cheap one for about $150 to last us until we could get one of the high end cameras when Judy goes back to Toronto in December. No such luck. There were no cheap ones, and so we bought an intermediate priced Kodak Easy Share DX6440, 4.0 Megapixels with 4X optical zoom and 3X digital zoom, superior to my earlier Fuji Fine Pix which is broken. It was not my first choice, but we did not want to go on such a voyage to the Orinoco Delta with just a few disposable cameras, so I compromised on the Easy Share, with which I am happy so far. However, it does mean learning a whole new system of downloading, saving, projecting, and modifying image size for E-mailing. Nothing is ever simple!

We left at 0500, before dawn, on Oct. 6 for the 57 mile voyage down the Gulf of Paria to Pedernales. This gulf, the Gateway to South America, is a large shallow sea (deepest area only 80 feet) between the west side of Trinidad and the Venezuela mainland, with the Orinoco Delta at the southern end. We sailed for a few hours, but motored and motor sailed most of the way as Judy wanted to be sure to arrive in daylight. We had light force 3 to 4 winds from the east for our southwesterly course. We took pictures of Good Time Charlie as Bob did of us. About 20 miles from our destination of Pedernales we entered the dramatically delineated darker brown muddy waters of the Orinoco. The Orinoco Delta covers an area greater than that of Trinidad and has several tributaries snaking through its silted tidal tropical jungle lowlands, including the Manamo, the Pedernales, and the Macareo Rivers, as well as the main waterway of the Orinoco itself. The Manamo is the northernmost of these rivers.

The chartlets provided five reliable waypoints through the shallows to the village of Pedernales . Motoring in stiff force 4 east winds and following the waypoints, we registered depths down to 12 feet in the muddy brown waters of the delta, passing a shore-linked oil platform just a couple of miles from Pedernales. On the shore opposite Pedernales was a large refinery with its cracking stacks ablaze with fiery gases. We had passed a few oil rigs in the Gulf of Paria, some abandoned and some in full operation. This part of the world provides oil for both Venezuela and Trinidad. It also provides a contrast from the primitive simple lifestyles of the Warao natives with the high-tech/industrial oil refinery installations.

We arrived at the village of Pedernales (09 58.01N, 062 15.02W) by 1530, anchoring off the river police post where we went in with our passports and papers. This is not an official port of entry. None of them spoke any English, and our Spanish was minimal to nonexistent. One of the officers took down our information on a sheet of paper, and that was all. No stamp in our passports, no entry fees; just a nod of welcome.

We wandered around the village with its broad concrete walkways fringed with open gutters leading to the tidal waterfront. At low tide the gutters ran into the river, and at high tide, they allowed water to wash back into the open channels, cleansing the gutters in each tidal cycle. There was considerable life on the streets, and children were frolicking in the muddy brown river water, several paddling around on large styrofoam packing cases (see attached pictures). There were no vehicles, except some interesting tricycles that were basically modified bicycles that had large metal carrier boxes over the two front wheels. Judy went into a store and was able to exchange $20.00 US for 2600 Bolivars, the local currency, and bought a few avocados. There was nothing else to spend the money on. Bob and I climbed up the bell tower of the attractive white stuccoed church to get a view over the single storied buildings and shacks of the town, after which we returned to the boats at anchor for a quiet night before setting off upstream on the Manamo River into the Orinoco Delta next day. 

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