Puerto Rico, part 3- Gilligan’s Island and Ponce

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…

Okay, the Gilligan’s Island we went to has nothing at all to do with the famed TV series. Its real name is Cayo Aurora and it is one of three islands that make up the Cayos de Caña Gorda, managed by the Department of Natural Resources (DRNA). It’s about 1 nm off the coast of Guánica. I think I read somewhere that the person who named it sort of looked like Bob Denver (that’s the actor who played Gilligan), but I can’t confirm that. 

Gilligan’s Island is a small mangrove island. It used to be quite the weekend hotspot for locals and tourists alike. There was a long dock where the hourly ferry from the mainland would drop off day trippers. Tourists at the resort in Guánica could rent kayaks and paddle over. Locals would bring their own boats over on the weekends to pick up a mooring ball and spend the day enjoying the water in the mangrove creeks or at the tiny beaches tucked among the mangroves. There were covered picnic areas with brick fire pits, changing huts, and a bathroom facility. 

I’m writing in the past tense because that was all destroyed during an earthquake in January of 2020, and it hasn’t been repaired or replaced yet. The quake also caused some sinking of the land and the mangroves have filled in. The park is officially closed, so visiting is at one’s own risk and with one’s own means of transportation; the ferries don’t go there anymore. We dinghied over and landed on a couple of very tiny sandy spots to walk what remains of trails we could find. We dinghied partway through one of the mangrove creeks and saw lots of fish. Dave and I snorkeled part of the reef on the south side of the island. The first dive mooring we picked up was in a field of sea grass overgrowing tumbled, dead coral, but we had more luck on the other ball closer to the breaking part of the reef. The hard coral was mostly dead, but its structure remained. It must have been amazing when it was alive. There was new coral growth, which is encouraging. We saw a small, healthy elkhorn coral and some fire coral, as well as some other hard corals for which I don’t know the names. We saw the usual suspects of small fish. It wasn’t a great snorkel, but it is a pretty little island. 

The next day was Tuesday, April 18^th and we moved with our buddy boats the short distance east to Ponce. The preferred anchorage is near the Yacht Club. It’s a small area and not very pretty, not to mention crowded with the mooring balls and anchored boats. It’s the first time we put out our typical 5:1 scope to set the anchor, but then drew it in to a 3:1 scope. (Scope is the ratio of water depth to length of anchor line/chain put out. If the water is 10’ deep, we would put out 50’ of anchor chain for a 5:1 scope, 30’ for 3:1.) Sometime in the late 1990s, the La Guancha Boardwalk here was opened to the public. It was a hot spot on the weekends, especially at night. The waterfront was lined with shops, restaurants and bars. Again, past tense. It was heavily damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017, and before any repairs were started it was damaged further by the January 2020 earthquake. There is a fishing cooperative at one corner of the anchorage that allows dinghies to tie up (the Yacht Club does not). So we went ashore and wandered a bit. About ¼ mile from the original boardwalk we encountered a park with food trucks lined up along the way. It’s a makeshift replacement for the boardwalk, but being a Sunday, the trucks were closed, except for a couple that sold drinks and hot dogs. We wanted a more substantial lunch and there was nothing within walking distance. One of our group had seen another dinghy dock at another fishing cooperative about a mile up into the bay. So we dinghied up and asked the fishermen and the DRNA officials (there was an office there) if we could leave our dinghies for a couple of hours while we got lunch. They put us all into an empty slip and recommended a restaurant about ½ mile down the road. It was a yummy lunch!

That was the sum total of our time in Ponce, at least for us and Caretta. Wild Horses stayed another two night and took care of some provisioning. Wednesday morning, we and Caretta headed 5.5 nm southeast to Isla Caja de Muertos, which is where I will pick this up next time. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!