Rainy Season on the Rio Dulce

Lots of water, lots of lightning, lots of work on the boat / Next week we’re heading home to Germany for vacation

By Renate Rüger, July 18, 2026

Guatemala – Rain is pounding on the corrugated metal roof—hard, loud, and faster and faster. More water pours down, pelting and thundering so loudly that we can no longer hear our own words. At the RAM Marina, there are two apartments, each with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a shared kitchen-living room. We’re staying in one of them. It’s better than sleeping on the boat right now, especially since we’d have to walk through the rain at night and navigate all the stilts the boats rest on to get to the restrooms. It always rains at night. Sometimes just in bursts, sometimes almost nonstop all night long. During the day it’s better—it’s hot and humid, and usually sunny. But when it rains, it pours, and it feels like a thousand stings on our bare arms and legs. It’s the rainy season on the Rio Dulce. And it’s lightning season. That can be dangerous for our Amira and the other boats—a single lightning strike and all the electronics on the boat are destroyed. For milliseconds, the boatyard lights up—once, then a second time—followed by thunder a second later. Often—far too often—it crashes right above us. We flinch every single time. Is our Amira still okay?

The typical view from the café of the gas station. Sailors meet here regularly.

To Germany in more than 42 hours

We’ll be escaping this weather for six weeks and leaving Amira behind. We’re going on vacation in Germany and are looking forward to seeing our kids, parents, and friends again. The countdown is on. We’re leaving on Thursday. As always, the trip from Rio Dulce is quite arduous: 8:50 a.m. by tuk-tuk to the bus, a seven-and-a-half-hour ride to Guatemala City (270 km), around 5:00 p.m. from the Litegua bus station to the hotel, up at 3:00 a.m., check-in at the airport at 4:00 a.m., 6:15 a.m. departure for Houston, Texas. By then, we’ll already have been on the road for over 21 hours. 10:19 a.m. landing in the U.S. ( time difference +1 hour), lines at U.S. passport control, hauling the suitcases onto the conveyor belt for the connecting flight, the remaining eight hours of waiting, 6:20 p.m. departure, landing in Frankfurt the next day at 11:15 a.m. (time difference +7 hours)—after a travel time of 32 hours. 2:15 p.m.: Train to Berlin-Spandau; 8:00 p.m.: Arrival; then on to the Airbnb via subway and on foot, waiting for the keys to be handed over. All in all, a trip that would theoretically take about 42 hours using four modes of transportation. Theoretically, that is, if all the scheduled travel times were met… Deutsche Bahn had already announced a 28-minute delay on Wednesday.

Nelson (left) and his colleague Oscar hoist the generator up, while Peter makes sure the machine stays balanced.

Working in the Hurricane Hole

So there are better “hurricane holes” for sailing to Europe. But we deliberately chose the RAM Marina because we know the people here. And that’s probably why we’ve made more progress on the boat. Nelson and Oscar removed the heavy generator from the hull; a RAM employee used an excavator to lift it from the boat onto the ground, where it’s been sitting—and, unfortunately, is still sitting—waiting to be picked up for a thorough cleaning and overhaul. Chris is currently installing the hydraulics for the autopilot, for which Caesar had to have a special mount custom-made. Ryan has inspected our rig—the mast, boom, and support wires—and plans to fix the issues he found on Sunday.

Oscar is attaching our generator to the excavator bucket.

Water from above, but not from the faucet

We’ve been busy, too—we didn’t just watch World Cup soccer games and go out to eat last month. On the boat, we were constantly taking things out of and putting them back into the cabins to lay cables and do similar work; in the apartment, we fought off ants and a scorpion; we cleaned and covered the boat for its “summer hibernation”; and we repaired the protective padding on the dinghy. Peter tried in vain to install the new switch for the water pump’s pressure regulator; in the end, he had to replace the entire pump with a new one. Now all that’s missing are the support rings for the hoses so that everything is watertight and we can run water from the faucet again.

Peter is adjusting the protective padding on the dinghy at the RAM Marina. — Peter adjusts the protective padding on the dinghy.

Meanwhile, I spent four days working in vain on the Sailing Amira blog to make sure everything would display properly on a tablet in both portrait and landscape modes, as well as on a cell phone. The page previews looked good, but the result on actual devices was a disaster—because the preview just didn’t work. You have to figure that out first, and then repeat the whole process more or less by feel and rough estimation. What’s still missing now is checking the PC translation, and so on and so forth.

Sailing Amira: Chris helps scoop out the water in which the lithium batteries are submerged — Chris is helping to skim off the water in which the lithium batteries are submerged.

Lithium Batteries in Water

It’s the same as always, and just like with everything else on the boat: One problem gets solved, and a new one pops up. Or another one is discovered by chance, like the rusted-through pipe fitting the other day, or the three lithium batteries sitting in water before that. When we discovered them, we were already worried that the water might flow over the batteries and damage them. The cause: a small pump designed to drain condensation from the air conditioner. Sabine in Bocholt already has a replacement ready for this defective part. We still need to get many other parts for the boat in Germany, as well as medication for the Pacific crossing.