Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands

U-Turn

Posted on March 20, 2017March 20, 2017 by Deborah

It is official, we’ve made a U-turn. While just days ago we were on a path floating down the string of Caribbean Islands and planning to spend the Hurricane season in Grenada before working our way across the South and Central American coast towards the jeweled and remote islands of the San Blas (Panama) from which we would slowly work our way back to the start, today we have our bow pointed West.

What happened in the past few weeks to totally derail decades worth of planning and dreaming?!? I don’t know for sure. Maybe it started when we left the Dominican Republic and knew we hadn’t even begun to see all it had to offer. We were only in one harbor after all. Or, on that logic, maybe it started when we sailed right past Rum and Conception in the Bahamas- they were both on my wanna-go-there list. It’s like we built up so much momentum then crashed and burned. Really, it probably started with the comparison of what we had read and seen about the San Blas islands in our preparation phase (years and years ago) to what we heard from people who have been there recently. Seems we did our research once and didn’t revisit it again. To shorten it down to a sentence or two: It is no longer a place that is only reached by the rare cruising boat, it is a place now easily reachable by plane, charter boat, cruise ship excursion tours and probably even jet skis too. We are listening to reports of overcrowded anchorages with fees to anchor and even come ashore. This is a far cry from what we are in search of. Not all the islands have been corrupted by the taste of tourism, but it seems many have. Some cruisers loved the San Blas, some hated it, some people said it is now a lost destination- the window to truly experience it unmolested has already closed. However, everyone does seem to be in agreement that if what you are looking for is free diving, spearfishing, clear water, unlimited white beautiful beaches, and the freedom to travel among them we won’t find any better than the Ragged and Jumento Islands of the Bahamas. In all of our time in the Bahamas we never made it there. Normally we take it all in and just go see for our selves but all of a sudden 1600 miles (plus the return trip) seemed like a really, really long way to sail for a destination that we now had some doubts about how much we would like. From this doubt it snowballed and we’ve been a lost, spinning mess since. If time (money) were not the limiting factor we would still just go and see for our selves then come back and hit the parts of the Bahamas we missed and/or loved again. We don’t have that many seasons left. It is an either or situation. Decisions had to be made, priorities sorted.

Once San Blas was in question the entire Eastern Caribbean quickly came under review. Did we want to still go to Grenada for the summer? The Eastern Caribbean was never our interest, they were just islands along our path we hoped to enjoy on our way to our primary destination. We’ve been in the USVI for almost three weeks now for weather, and while we know we can’t compare these charter clogged islands to the entire chain, we think we have seen enough to make a decision. Though the process has been a doozey!! We’ve flip-flopped on an almost hourly basis for days now! I even made a color-coded spreadsheet with our possible routes to help sort out all our options. It just added to the mess. Anyone who has come in contact with us as we were working out this whole morphing-of-a-dream thing has probably felt our sting. Sorry. We never forgot that we are in a the most privileged of positions, but, still, transitions can be exhausting.

We finally were able to work it through to this: With our remaining cruising seasons, was it more important WHERE and how FAR we went (and completing what we set out to do)-or-HOW we experienced these remaining seasons. Until now the where and the how meshed. We were someplace we thought was terrific and doing all the things we love. So Simple. We don’t feel that way now. Where do I begin without sounding sour and bratty? I suppose I can’t, but we are not enjoying the crowded harbors, we don’t like being told we have to use a mooring ball, and we really don’t like having to pay $26.00 a night to use it. We don’t like the hunt to find the exclusions to these rules. The beaches are beautiful, sure, but are littered with bars, and beach-floaty rental shacks, and, the kicker for me, they come with roped-off swimming areas that I am supposed to stay in. I, apparently, do not like being told where I can swim! Throw on top that you have to pay just to access many of the beaches and we are done. Done, done. What all of that boils down to is that we feel we are someplace we could just as easily visit and experience just as wholly by plane and we are worried it will likely be the same for the majority of the way down the islands. The freedoms we have by traveling on our own little boat are all gone here. Are our concerns for the remaining islands valid? I think so. Would we see beautiful things, have amazing experiences, and meet wonderful people if we kept going? Absolutely. Will we regret not venturing on? That is the real question. We hope not. We won’t have this opportunity again.

Instead of continuing on we have chosen to spend our precious remaining seasons living a life that cannot be reached by plane. We are going back to where we eat from the water more meals than not, have the freedom to chose where to drop the anchor and make home for the night- perhaps a beautiful beach with not another soul in sight, and live a more self-sufficient and free life in a part of the world that is still unblemished by crowds (before it is). Where we want to do that happens to be in the direction we just came from. The current plan (it has been unwavering for a whole 30 hours- a record for the past few weeks) is to finish waiting on some mail here in St. Thomas, then slowly work our way back through Puerto Rico seeing what we missed on our speedy sail East, revisit Dominican Republic, and then head back to our beloved Bahamas. We won’t miss the Raggeds this time! Plans for Cuba are actively being researched to help satisfy the “see new places” desire. Yesterday we committed and made arrangement for hurricane storage if needed on Stocking Island. It is not the plan of world-travelers or of adventurous sailors. It is just our little happy-happy plan.

^^ Despite our overall feelings, our introduction to St. Thomas could not have been sweeter. A few miles out we hailed our friends on Smitty– we haven’t seen them since sailing with them in the Bahamas about a year ago and were excited to see them again. We didn’t really expect an answer on the radio, they were not expecting us for a few more weeks, but we got one! Before we even made it all the way in the harbor they had a mooring ball arranged for us and a plan to get us in the water immediately! Best. Welcome. Ever. They gave us the tours and the lowdown’s on where to get stuff like groceries and laundry, and more, it has been fun catching back up.

^^We moved out of the mooring field and into Brewers Bay anchorage to give ourselves some more room and hang on our own equipment for the days and days of weather we got. We knew it was coming, that is why we had been traveling so fast.

^^ We participated in a community clean-up day with the crew on Blabber. The ladies liked Keith’s dreadlock painting skills!!!

^^ We sailed over to St. John to get away from the city for a night. It was pretty. We enjoyed seeing the mountains green and not covered with square buildings. We tied the boat off to the required mooring, secured the dinghy off to the designated dinghy area and swam in the buoyed swim zone. Everything was nice. The experience did little to sway us from turning around.

^^While at St. Johns we went in search of a beach that Kai was allowed on. The main one was off limits and the one behind us was to rocky to land on so we went to the next little one we saw. It was perfect and no one was around. Kai ran from one end to the other over and over. When we got back to the boat we realized that that cute little beach had been in the BVI’s. Ooopppps!! We were not allowed there and Kai REALLY wasn’t allowed there. (So, technically the farthest East we got was the BVI’s!)

^^ Our favorite little spot on St. Thomas ended up being Brewers Bay. (The previous three photos) It sets under the pretty little University of the Virgin Islands Campus. The University has opened the beach to the public for free and many locals come and enjoy it daily. Two food trucks park up on the road. The other side of the anchorage is the airport runway so it provided us entertainment to watch the little planes landing and taking off when we were getting gusts in the 30’s and 40’s! It is filled with sea turtles, so that is nice too.

^^We took a walk on Megan’s Bay Beach just because it was listed as one of the top 10 beaches in the world. Of course we went after 5pm because we just don’t pay to walk on a beach. It was pretty, and long. We left feeling very lucky….we could list a bunch of beaches that we enjoyed more. I think our judging criteria was just different.

^^ Lost in thought….

Puerto Rico in a Blink

Posted on March 10, 2017March 10, 2017 by Deborah

Okay, so the last post left off with us waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to come out and give our little boat a peek over. They never came. We called again the next morning got transferred all over the island and finally were given our magical little combination of numbers that said we were allowed to set foot in our country. Not sure why they didn’t just do that from the beginning –but whatever.

I had planned on sewing us our Puerto Rico courtesy flag on the sail from DR. Keith, being the most thoughtful husband ever, knew I wasn’t up to it and stopped in the sail shop in Luperon the morning we left and bought us one. I include a photo…..just in case you were thinking of getting some sail or canvas repair done while in Luperon. Hems? Stitching? Not so straight. But ever so appreciated!!! I didn’t have to sew it and it was only $4.00.

Boquerón is a University and local family vacation spot and with it being a holiday weekend we got to see it in full action. Coming back to the boat from calling Customs we found ourselves swarmed with jet skies. Hundreds! It was like kicking a hornets nest of them. There was some sort of club or something and they zoomed into the anchorage all afternoon. Normally we hate jet skies, but at this point we just had to be entertained by the whole circus. There was a police boat and three police jet skies near us. They constantly had people pulled over. It looked like they had a profitable weekend. We did escape the craziness for a bit by going ashore and doing some touristy people-watching for the afternoon.

Having seen all we needed to see at Boquerón, we had a great little sail around the corner to the quiet water-side town of La Parguera. The town was cute and colorful, but we anchored off in a secluded little spot behind some reefs and snuggled up next to some mangrove islands. For the first time in a LONG time we got to go for a dive and catch dinner. We caught lobster, Keith saw a baby hogfish. It was too small to go for, but was still exciting to see! The water felt great.

Our anchorage was right next to this blimp station. It was pretty neat watching it be brought down and float back up. It did crazy things to our radio reception and Kai wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do about it. It tested his little watch-dogging skills.

The main attraction, though, was searching for monkeys! We heard that the little island we were anchored in front of was home to 400 monkeys. Monkeys are on my bucket list so we went in search. There is a mangrove lined creek that runs through the islands. We turned off the motor and quietly paddled through the entire creek. We didn’t hear, or see, or smell any monkeys. It was a neat trip though and saw lots of other wildlife- just no monkeys.

^^Even Kai helped look for monkeys.

The weather has been perfect for sailing along the coast. Technically this is still all part of the Thorny Path, but our luck has been holding out and it has been easy sailing so we’ve kept moving. Next stop was Ponce. We figured we would basically set up camp in Ponce as it had wonders such as malls, Wal-Marts, Sam’s Clubs, marine stores, US Post Offices and is in the land of Amazon delivery. We’ve acquired quite a list of items that we needed to take care of. We also expected to do some sight-seeing of Puerto Rico from there too.

We were at Ponce exactly 55 minutes. That was long enough to discover that the anchorage is too crowded with moored boats to get into it, the Yacht Club no longer allows dinghies to access their dinghy dock-even for a fee, there was no WiFi access, and we would need a taxi everyday to get to all the shops if we did find a safe place to tie the dinghy (we didn’t consider the boat ramp a safe spot). In an unusually decisive moment we turned around and kept sailing down the coast (after filling up on cheap diesel). Ponce would just have to be visited by rental car from somewhere else.

^^Ponce, not so much our scene.

That evening we slid into the Salinas anchorage just as the sun was getting low. It was a much better spot than Ponce! Pretty, cruiser friendly, calm anchorage, and manatees swimming by the boat. We went to bed thinking it would be home for the next week.

That plan was thrown out the window before breakfast the next morning. The weather report was that the glorious good weather we have been enjoying was going to be coming to a screeching halt soon. And when it did, it was going to be ugly for a really long time. Like weeks. So basically the take away was get to where you wanted to be stuck. While we had planned on staying in Salinas for a while, it sounded like we were going to be there for a LONG while. The decision became Wal-marts and projects or beaches and swimming. Hmmmm. Beaches won. I heard they have beautiful ones in the Spanish Virgin Islands!

We did a mad scramble of completing as much stuff as we could in one day. Luckily everything just seemed to line up for us all day long. We even ran across a cruiser with a car headed to the grocery store with extra room in their back seat for us. We had planned on doing some major reprovisioning while in Puerto Rico. Instead we just ran a cart as fast as we could down each isle and dumped stuff in so we could catch the same ride back. I didn’t even have my list with me. Beans, tuna, toilet paper and off we go! We actually did pretty good I think. Auto-pilot and freezer parts, we decided, would have to wait for a while longer. As well as mail from the US.

And that concluded our speedy tour of Puerto Rico, we headed out at first light the next morning. We will definitely have to come back and give this island some more time. But, if we have learned anything, take the good weather when you have it!

^^Did I mention the sailing has been glorious?!?

So, our tour of the Spanish Virgin Islands is almost identical as Puerto Rico’s. I can’t even give it its own post. Instead of a week we blew through in 24 hours. We stopped in Vieques as we wanted to sneak in a quick dive. We tried three different anchorages but they were all too rolly so sailed straight to Culebra for the night. This is where we were going to camp for the next few weeks. Once we got there we realized that the only beach we would be able to access in the high winds was a preserve. Which is great, but Culebra and the rest of the Spanish Virgin Islands have so many great diving spots and cove-y beaches. We knew we had to see them but it would be probably be best when the weather would be more conducive to enjoying them-or even getting to them! Maybe we should have thought that out better before we left Salinas? Anyway……off to St. Thomas! We will back-track when the weather clears. We are not skipping these islands.

Besides, St. Thomas has K-marts and US Post Offices. Even better than that—friends!!!!

The Mona

Posted on February 23, 2017 by Deborah

This may sound stupid, but the first thing we did after finally getting our despacho was fall asleep, but we had an hour to leave the harbor and we were the first boat out of three that was planning on taking the same window to get cleared out so we had a few minutes. Between my climbing fever and the bureaucracy stress we just needed a moment to regroup before starting out on what ended up being a long trip. We left that afternoon, sailed through the night, sailed all the next day, sailed through the next night, and sailed through the next day until pulling into Boquerón Puerto Rico in the early evening. The autopilot functioned for about one hour of that whole trip before breaking. Having to hand steer made the trip seem to take foreeeeevvvveeeerrrrr!!! The conditions weren’t bad, actually quite good, but parts still felt something like having strapped your home onto the back of a galloping horse. Keith took the majority of the watches and we disregarded a set watch schedule. When ever one of us naturally woke up from a nap, we took over. Most of my watches were short, an hour or two. It was all either of us could do feeling so crappy. All I wanted was to climb under a mountain of blankets and not come back out.

As we passed near Samana Bay we kept a look out for whales. This time of year humpback whales migrate and gather in the shallow waters off of the coast of DR and the mothers birth their calves here. I really didn’t want to spot any. Our boat insurance covers pretty much everything a normal policy covers except it has one very clear exclusion- damage by marine life (whales). We figure there is good reason. At first all we saw were fishing nets, in fact we found ourselves surrounded by a large drift net near Samana. We had to cut the engine and float over it because we couldn’t see either edge of it. Then we heard Antares shout on the VHF- WHALES!!!!! Off our starboard bow, probably close to a mile away, we saw them. At first we thought we saw the whole whale breaching then realized it was only its tail. That is when I really realized how massive they are! We watched as the whales would lift their huge tails out and slap the surface causing a huge splash. We also saw them spouting and even a few breaches. My favorite was watching them roll over-and they did it over and over again. One gigantic fin would slowly lift out of the water, arc, and splash down thunderously just as the second gigantic fin would lift out and follow. They put on a non-stop show for about half an hour. I hadn’t wanted to see them from our boat but it ended up being one of the most amazing experiences. There we were sitting in our cockpit, in our pajamas, watching a few of only 15000 great humpback whales in the whole world frolic in front of us. MAGNIFICENT!!!! I didn’t get photos, my camera doesn’t have a good zoom so all that would have come out is a lot of water and sky and a tiny splash. Instead we just took in the moment. We didn’t go any closer to them, they were longer and heftier than our boat and they were tossing there massive bodies about like a tantruming child, we stayed well out of their way!!! It was an absolutely spectacular experience.

The second night of sailing was long and a little bouncy, but completely uneventful as we finally pulled away from the coast of the DR. The morning found us at the edge of the Hourglass Shoals and the beginning of the Mona Passage. I could write a paragraph or more on the hows and whys the Mona Passage can be one of the most treacherous passages in the Atlantic. But we have had enough drama the past week so I will just write that it was flat calm-totally mellow. Of course, that is specifically why we were so determined to make our weather window out of Luperon on time. The Mona did bring her own surprises though- more whales!!! At first Keith thought he saw a big log in the water but it was too black and shiny. When he realized it was a whale, he thought it was a baby humpback and started looking for mama! It was a pilot whale (we think). We passed within 20 feet!!! I was down below and didn’t make it up in time to see it, but it wasn’t my only chance. From there on, through the whole Mona Passage, we passed pods of them. These ones were smaller than the boat and were just floating at the surface- not tossing their heft about like the giant humpbacks. We still didn’t get closer on purpose. It ended up being a great Mona Passage crossing. We are becoming great believers in being very selective of weather windows!

By late afternoon we had pulled into Boqueron, Puerto Rico and dropped hook in the company of our passage-making friends Antares and Blabber. To clear in Customs we needed to make a phone call which would have entailed launching the dinghy and putting the outboard motor on it- they were both secured away for for the trip. Instead we raised the Q-flag and were both asleep before dark.

In the morning we learned Antares and Blabber were going to take advantage of the favorable weather and keep going, they have already seen Puerto Rico. We have not and we need to take care of some details like repairing our autopilot and getting some mail shipped in from the the US so we said our “until we see you agains” over coffee aboard Blabber. Then we went ashore and called Customs. We had the bought the Customs sticker and signed up for the Small Vessel Reporting Program in the States so we expected to just have to make a phone call like when we cleared into Florida from the Bahamas. That is what all the other US vessels seemed to do when they got here. Instead we were told that someone would be out to the boat for an inspection within a few hours-just wait on the boat. That was fine we needed some more time to relax and recover anyway. We went back to the boat and waited. And waited. By 4:00 we got impatient and Keith went in and called again but there was no answer anywhere. No one ever came out to our boat. There was a concert going on on the beach in front of the anchorage at night. We got to enjoy it from the cockpit but the smells of fried and sweet vendor food also floated our way. If we had been free to, we would have gone ashore and joined in. But we were not free to go. Again. Seems to be our story lately!

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