Cruising To Suriname

Image courtesy Noel Pauw - Waterland Marina Resort

Here is the Waterland Marina in Suriname on one of those lovely foggy river mornings. It's not always like this of course, and the jungle is green and growing across the river and right beside the marina site. The noise of the howler monkeys is a delightful and constant companion every morning and evening, some obviously quite close, though we never sighted them on the dock.

Image courtesy Noel Pauw - Waterland Marina Resort

We feel the Waterland Marina is the premium cruising boat location in Suriname, safe, secure and very friendly, if a little isolated. Potable water, WiFi and AC power (110v/60hz & 220v/60hz) are available on the dock. The weekly Sunday luncheon there is a spectacular social celebration of fusion food, well attended by locals and visitors.

There are other choices however, and our friends on the catamaran Ceilyhd stayed a little further downstream at the town of Domburg, where the Harbor Resort Domburg offers swing moorings on the river plus restaurant, bar, WiFi, pool and laundry at very reasonable rates. If you're happy on a mooring, then this is also a very good location, specially since the restaurant is open each day, which is not yet the case at Waterland.

Suriname is not a destination you choose for palm trees and sandy beaches. Yet this country does have beautiful places, and a colorful history, however you should visit the interior and explore the natural environment to have the best experiences.

The stand-out benefit of visiting Suriname is the generally respectful social conditions and safe surroundings. It's a kind of old-fashioned place, where people are a little shy but will happily stop and talk to you in the street. The capital Paramaribo (more info here) is a great place for provisioning, with three major western-style supermarkets offering products and produce from around the world. Paramaribo also offers a wide range of marine engineering and maintenance services.

Paramaribo River Entry

Most cruisers enter via the Paramaribo River, which is quite simple, the channel being deep and well marked - though the number of buoys differs from those shown on the charts, and our three different charting systems all disagreed on these to some extent. Large ships and tug/barge combinations ply the river entrance, with traffic controlled by the Maritime Authority of Suriname ("MAS"). Visiting yachts should call MAS as they approach the channel and request permission to enter the river. Using a rising tide it can take up to six hours to reach Domburg or Waterland, so an early morning approach is recommended. Note that the tide runs at up to 3.5 knots upstream, so pushing against the tide will slow you down considerably.

Waterland Marina, Suriname River

Both Waterland and Harbor Resort will provide all the guidance needed for the necessary immigration and customs clearances. On arrival we first visited the MAS offices to process the vessel in, then the Consular Office to obtain a visa stamp (a small fee is charged for this), then finally the Military Police office for the immigration stamp.

Outbound clearance was easier - visit the military police one day before for an exit stamp in the passports, then notify MAS of departure by VHF radio when outbound in the channel. Very simple. We recommend Suriname highly as a safe and relaxing stopover for cruising boats in the region.

View Open CPN On The iPad

Open CPN is a very popular navigation program for cruising sailors. Now, with the advent of accurate charts derived from Google Earth satellite images, it plays a very important role for us in tropical areas.

Like many boats, Crystal Blues has the navigation PC installed below decks at the nav station, locked down in a safe and (hopefully) dry location.

However we really want to see those Google Earth charts when we are up on deck, moving around in the cockpit and at the wheel.

The iPad is the perfect tool for this, portable, stable and with good battery life - but Open CPN doesn't run on the iPad.

The iPad does have WiFi capability, so in theory at least we could connect it to our PC down below at the navigation station, which is exactly what we do.

We use Splashtop Streamer, a free shareware application, to stream the PC screen directly to our iPad. This allows us to see the PC screen from anywhere on deck (in fact anywhere on the boat), and provides basic mouse and keyboard functions to control the PC as well.

So, I can stand at the wheel and see the display from Open CPN, or from our Transas Navigator ECN  package, in real time.  I can review my Sailmail GRIB files as well, without having to "go below".  So how does this work?

Seven Days, 960 Nautical Miles

Just over one week into this voyage and we are traveling well.

960 Nautical Miles Sailed
148 Nautical Miles To Go
0 Fish
Course 283 degrees
Speed 6.9 knots
Ley has read 5 books (!)

Last night the winds finally lifted a little and moved more to the north.

Crystal Blues finally had "a bone in her teeth", with the apparent wind at 75 degrees to starboard, 9 knots true, and we were skating along in the dark at 6 to 7 knots, flying the mainsail, genoa and staysail.

Honestly, I'd fly more sails if we had them, as we're keen to make landfall, but the big MPS became hopelessly jammed in its snuffer two days ago, and we need to sort it out on land.

Around 300 miles out from the Sri Lankan coast we started meeting local fishing boats - small steel affairs with diesel engines and equipped with trolling lines, traps and nets. They do it all. The first boat chased us for miles before drawing alongside to trade - fish for cigarettes seemed to be the deal. Whilst we do carry cigarettes for trade, I didn't want to get close to them at sea, so we smiled and waved and said a gentle "no thanks". The fish they were offering was huge, but dried and salted - not to our taste. A second boat early today was a real comedy, with some very funny antics on board, crew jumping all over the roof of the wheelhouse. basically they seemed really happy to meet someone out here, wanted to know where we were going etc.
I was a little reticent to bring out the camera and photograph them, until I saw one of them was photographing us ! After that it was a bit of riot as they played stupid games on top of the wheelhouse, all this in a very rolly sea that has us moving around very cautiously. These Sri Lankan fisherman have a great sense of humour.

We finally sorted out the wrinkles with the satellite data system. It was another case of too many networks. Our navigation PC has 2 ethernet connections running concurrently - WiFi to the Iridium Go! satellite device and wired to the boat's own ethernet network (for printers, network disc storage etc). Windows 7 normally handles these scenarios well, and can even route from one net to another. Seems that the new software from Sailmail and Predict Wind simply couldn't handle it though. We've had a series of very constructive emails with Jim Corenman of Sailmail, in the USA, who is now working on an update to the Sailmail program that will handle concurrent network connections. Jim has been a delight to work with, and we find the the Saildocs service is proving invaluable for weather forecasting at sea. I think we have the best of both worlds, using the Sailmail / Saildocs mail software and then having a choice of HF radio or Satellite for the transmission link.


We've moved through a couple of time zones now, putting the clocks back another hour yesterday just so the sun would set "at the proper time". So our local time is now UTC minus 6 hrs. Each evening we participate in a loosely organised radio network for vessels crossing the Indian Ocean. The Jupiter Net provides a facility for emergency radio relay, position reporting and general discussion. High Frequency radio conditions out here are not great, but the reporting and conversations are welcome. We look forward to joining some of the other boats in Sri Lanka and points further south.

Right now the wind has decided to retreat again, swinging behind us and reducing in strength until its just a frustrating little breeze, so the engine is back on. We hope it comes back soon.

Our position is clear at : http://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/CrystalBlues

Too Many Networks - NMEA 2000, STng & More

Turck Devicenet Hub - For NMEA 2000

As you may have seen from our earlier story, we're progressively updating to newer navigation systems on board Crystal Blues, with our first update being the autopilot system. 

It is getting crazy folks - upgrading the systems in stages means that presently we have both the old and the new networks running, which means (count them) seven data networks on board :  NMEA0183 / NMEA2000 / ST1 / ST2 / STNg / HSB / Ethernet.

The NMEA 2000 networking standard is clearly the preferred network for the future, and fortunately has been adopted by our preferred vendor Raymarine, even if they insist on using non-standard connectors for their own version called STNg (those extra pins and wires in the Raymarine cables are there to carry legacy Seatalk 1 data). 

Our new autopilot uses only STNg, the older unit uses ST1.  Our sailing instruments use ST1 and ST2, plus NMEA0183.  And of course the older radar and sonar use Seatalk HSB to share graphics.  What a nightmare.  Unless we put a completely new system on board, we needed a way to integrate now,  provide a logical upgrade path in the future and to monitor what was happening on the network.