Plume

An Extended Stopover in Guatemala

The last time that we heard from them was last year in Cuba. The Plumes are continuing their journey across the seas and oceans - writing to us this month from Guatemala.

Plume

Published 27/05/2025

By Gilles Ruffet

Issue: 202

Published: july / aug. 2025

Discover this issue

Who: Flo & family
Where: Guatemala
Multihull: 1997 Athena 38
Facebook: @voyage.de.Plume

Since we bought Plume, we’ve covered almost 20,000 miles. That’s almost the equivalent of sailing around the world. We travel mainly under sail, and the rig is our main means of propulsion. So we check and maintain it regularly, just as we would an engine. And on our last check, we were surprised to find that one of the terminal forks on a capshroud had a crack in it. Just the sort of thing you’d want to be aware of at anchor, to make sure you don’t end up with the mast falling on your head. Our stopover in Guatemala continued. Of course, the maintenance, checks, overhauls and improvements that we had carried out on Plume were worthwhile, especially before venturing out into the Pacific. A few months ago, we put our catamaran back in the dry dock, in the Nanajuana shipyard marina on the Rio Dulce in Guatemala. The last time had been in France. The tides in French Guyana had enabled us to get ashore on a beach at low tide, for a quick service. Suffice to say, we had quite a list of work that needed to be done. But that wasn’t the main reason for our long stopover. If this trip around the world lets us meet new people, make cultural and natural discoveries, it also shapes us, molds us and changes us. And we’d also like our daughters to be able to return from this journey bilingual. Or even master a third language. That’s why we decided, in agreement with them, to send them to school in Guatemala. Here, the calendar and school years are identical. So they started school in January, at the same time as the other Guatemalan children. Now they’re back in the classroom, a welcome change from the catamaran bench seats. The teaching is in Spanish, which our girls hardly spoke at all. After two months, it looks as though they’re not doing too badly, since they’re at the top of their class after their first exams.