Tag: Passage making

Luperón to Puerto Rico

We interrupt the chronology of our trip to notify you that we made it to Puerto Rico. Sound the horns! Ring the bells! Huzzah! 

Here’s the story…

In case you missed it, we arrived in Luperón on March 13th. We were there for 25 days waiting for a weather window to continue east. The first potential weather window presented itself for March 27th, but we didn’t take it for various reasons I may describe at another time; it turned out to be a good decision. We had our eyes on a potential second window for the following week, but it didn’t pan out. Our chance finally arrived Easter weekend and it was going to be a good one. We would get our despacho (departure papers) on Saturday and head out either that night or the wee hours of Sunday morning to start our direct shot to Puerto Rico. Silly us! 

Easter is a BIG deal in the DR. We didn’t understand how big until we learned Thursday morning that Customs & Ports was closing at noon that day and wouldn’t reopen until Monday morning. In the DR, one checks out with Customs & Ports first, then goes to the Armada for the official despacho. With Customs & Ports closing Thursday, there would be no despachos until Monday morning. The other thing you need to know about DR despachos is that the day you get it is the day you leave port. Yikes! The conditions would not be good to depart until late Saturday night, and there was no guarantee that the weather window would hold long enough if we waited until Monday. What to do? 

Several boats were in the same situation, so we created a WhatsApp group to discuss strategy. Four of us (Indigo Lady, Wild Horses, Caretta, and Bitty Rose) decided to get our despachos Thursday, leave the harbor anchorage and stage in the little Pinzon anchorage just outside the official harbor and hope the Armada ignored us for the holiday weekend. 

The Armarda did not ignore us. 

At 2pm on Friday, I got a call from a representative of the Armada. They wanted to know why the four of us were still there, and threatened to take our despachos if we didn’t leave right away. I begged a little time to confer with our buddy boats and said I’d call back to let them know of our decisions. After some texting amongst the group members, and a call to Chris Parker (the human weather router we use), we all decided to leave, but really wanted to wait until midnight once the seas and winds had settled. I called the Armada representative and explained that midnight was the safest time to leave and if we were forced to leave earlier, the Armada may have to come rescue a boat or two (perhaps a slight exaggeration). Irritated, he finally told me that if anyone was there in the morning he was taking our despachos, and he hung up. 

So…at 12am Saturday morning we all hauled anchor and had a very decent passage to Río San Juan, 52 nm east of Luperon. We dropped anchor for the day, when the winds & seas pick up, and rested until 12am Sunday morning when we all hauled anchor again and headed for Escondido another 55 nm east. It was a good passage and we brought up the rear, anchoring around 10am or so. We passed a quiet Easter Sunday in the shadow of some mighty fine mountains, with a little village barely visible just beyond a beach. Our next stop would be Puerto Rico. Bitty Rose left just after 5pm Easter night while the rest of us waited until 4am Monday morning. It was a quiet, calm cruise of about 15-20 nm around Cabo (Cape) Cabron and Cabo Samaná. As we were passing the mouth of Bahía Samaná (Samana Bay), Dave & I took a different route than the others, so at this point our stories diverge for about 24 hours.

Escondido beach
Escondido beach & village
Our buddy boats at Escondido
Wild Horses & Caretta at sunrise

Our friends on Wild Horses and Caretta went north of what’s called the Hourglass Shoals. Dave and I opted to continue down along the DR east coast to near Punta Cana (Cana Point) before turning into the Mona Passage south of Hourglass Shoals. The first 7 hours from Escondido around the capes and across the mouth of Samaná Bay were wonderfully calm. Then, around 11am, the wind and seas started picking up a bit. Then they started picking up a lot. It was a very bumpy, wet ride for the next 3-4 hours as we hobby-horsed and took water over both bows. Good thing Dave installed and deployed the wind/rain shield or he would have been soaked! We slowed to 3 kts and started talking about bailing out at Punta Macao to wait until the seas subsided. The wind and seas started calming a bit, but we were still only making 3 kts. Hmmm… We’ve been in worse seas making better time, so Dave suspected that something wrapped one or both of our propellers. Now we had two reasons to stop at Punta Macao. We’d lost radio contact with our buddy boats not long after we learned they were experiencing the same bumpy conditions (too far away), but we picked up another sailboat that hailed us. We both decided to stop at Punta Macao and did, in fact, meet there. 

I started to get a little nervous because our despacho was for Samaná; it was not an international despacho to clear out of the country. We had read that most folks who stop in Punta Macao get a visit from the Armada, who would want to see our despacho and would ask why we had not stopped in Samaná. Why didn’t we get an international despacho? From what we had read, most boats that set out from Luperón end up stopping in Samaná anyway because the weather window doesn’t hold. If we had officially cleared out of the country with an international despacho, and then had to stop in Samaná, we would have had to pay to check back into DR. We wanted to avoid that, so we took a gamble. Turns out I worried needlessly. 

We set anchor at Punta Macao around 5:30pm and immediately started pulling out snorkel gear and tools for Dave to check our props. We had something wrapped around the shaft of our port prop, but starboard was clear. Dave had to launch the hookah so he didn’t have to keep coming up for air while he worked. I sat in the sugar scoop and handed him tools and took what he handed me. He removed the prop and was then able to remove the wrapped stuff quickly and reassemble the prop. Turns out it was not a fish net, as we had anticipated, but was one of those synthetic burlap type bags. While he cleaned gear, I warmed our dinner. We ate quickly and then hauled anchor, along with our new buddy boat. Maybe the Armada saw that we were making a repair and decided to hold off visiting until they knew whether or not we would leave. Maybe they were recovering from the busy holiday weekend and had no intention of visiting us at all. Regardless, they did not visit us and we did not need to defend our travel plans. Phew!

This is what wrapped our prop

The seas had calmed and our passage continued smoothly but for a couple of hours during one of Dave’s wee hour watches when it got a bit bumpy again, but not as bad as the afternoon. It was nice having a buddy boat in sight and in radio communication, especially during the night watches. I saw sunrise over the Mona Passage in calm seas. We learned to stop the boat and clear our propellers of accumulated sargassum seaweed occasionally, by pulsing them in reverse, to keep up our speed. Seas were glassy for a bit, then a bit bumpy about 10 nm out from Puerto Real until we were close enough to be in the lee of the island. We arrived in port around 1:30pm. Wild Horses and Caretta had arrived about 8am, and Bitty rose the day before. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!

Sunrise over the Mona Passage

Now we are at our second Caribbean island and one step closer to the Caribbean Sea. By the time you read this, we’ll actually be there, because as I type, we are en route to our first anchorage on the south coast of Puerto Rico, the northern border of the Caribbean sea. 

Next week I’ll probably wrap up our stay in Luperón and then after that, pick up with our Puerto Rico adventures. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!

Farewell Abacos, Hello (again) Great Harbor Cay

Our stint at Manjack Cay was our last touristy hurrah before heading back to the Berry Islands. We left Manjack the morning of Friday, July 9th and arrived at Great Harbor Cay in the Berry Islands mid-afternoon on Friday the 16th. Our focus at this point was readying ourselves and Indigo Lady for the two days we would take to get back to GHC and we decided to do most of the preparations at Marsh Harbor. 

We arrived at the little bay anchorage just outside of Marsh Harbor on the afternoon of Saturday the 10th. We spent three nights and three very busy days there. Sunday-Tuesday were all work, especially for Dave. In late June Dave discovered there was a leak in the port engine room around the rudder post. It was small, but no leak through the hull is good and small ones have a habit of becoming bigger, so Dave wanted to repair it before heading back to GHC. That repair took from 9:00 am – 7:00 pm Sunday (some of that time was waiting for JB Weld putty to dry). Monday morning we walked to Maxwell’s Supermarket for some final provisions. Back onboard I tended to the unpacking and moving around of provisions while Dave started cleaning our hulls. I made him stop about 2/3 of the way because it was late and he was exhausted. We barely mustered enough energy to heat leftovers for dinner and listen to music in the hammocks before bed. We got little sleep that night due to a storm that started around 11:30 pm and didn’t finish until after 3:00 am. Once again, the storm came from the only unprotected direction in the anchorage, making it bouncy and noisy with the waves hitting the hulls. We dragged ourselves out of bed just after 8:00 am Tuesday. Dave managed to finish cleaning the hulls after breakfast and I did some interior cleaning. Though tired, we decided to make the short 6 nm hop over to Hope Town knowing it would be a bumpy ride. It was, but it was short, and we were rewarded by a calm afternoon and night on a mooring and a final loaf of coconut bread from Vernon’s Grocery.

Wednesday morning we headed over to Lynard Cay. This was the first place we had anchored when we arrived in the Abacos in late May and it was now our launching spot for the return trip, retracing our steps around Hole in the Wall to Cross Harbor, then the following day from Cross Harbor to GHC. Lynard Cay to GHC is a 16-20 hour trip that we could do in a single shot, but I prefer to avoid overnight passages when they’re not necessary and it was not necessary in this case. The weather routing apps we use looked good enough to set out as planned at first light the next morning. We agreed that if conditions weren’t good we’d turn around and try again the next day.

As planned, we set off Thursday morning at 6:30 am, just as the sun was rising, and stuck our nose out into the Atlantic. The conditions weren’t perfect, but seemed doable, better than our trip up anyway. Conditions deteriorated about 2 hours out. We’re still learning how to apply all aspects of a forecast to a planned route. A forecast of 2-4’ seas from the SE with an 8 second period is based on the average top 1/3 of waves and assumes open water with no other influences; there can still be waves shorter or taller and from other directions. We did not account for the wind chop, which layers wind-driven waves over the predicted ones, and on that day the wind and seas were from different directions, which means we had waves from multiple directions- “confused” seas. On top of that, we were heading almost into some of the wave sets, which shortens the wave period making it bumpier. We chose to continue anyway for a few reasons. First, despite the bumpiness we were making better time than the trip up because the wind and some of those confused seas were more off our stern and giving us a bit of a push; it was only going to be an 8 our trip and we’d already done 2 hours. We knew when we made the turn to go around Hole in the Wall we would have the seas completely behind us and once around the point we’d be in the lee of Great Abaco where the water would flatten- that was another 2 hours of the trip. So I had 4 more hours of bumpy conditions to suffer through (the bouncing doesn’t really bother Dave). I’d taken one seasickness pill but should have taken two because I still wasn’t feeling great, mostly tired, and all I could do for 5 of the first 6 hours was stand and stare at the horizon waiting for the torture to end. Onward we trudged. I rejoiced when we made that turn to go around Hole in the Wall! We anchored in Cross Harbor by mid-afternoon and got a nap in before dinner (which I’d had the sense to prepare in advance) and we got a good night’s sleep. The next morning, Friday the 16th, was much better. We left at about the same time of the morning and had following seas the entire 8 hours. We were anchored in Bullocks Harbor by 3:00 pm and in the hammocks with celebratory drinks shortly thereafter.

We’re currently exploring the Berry Islands for the remainder of our time in the Bahams, which is quickly nearing its end. We have booked flights back to the US for mid August. We will pick up our car from my West Palm Beach cousins and start slowly driving home, stopping to visit family and friends along the way, assuming the stupid Delta variant of COVID doesn’t get any worse.

Next week I’ll tell you about our time in the Berry Islands. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!