Those of you who follow our movements in details for the last few days may wonder what we do exactly. The little boats on our web page are pretty close on the south shore of Puerto Rico and even if we have new standing rigging and a main sail all repaired, we are still moving only by motor. I think we need to give some explanations but to follow properly you need a map of the region.
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Since the village of Luperon in Dominican Republic up to the St-Marteen Island on the East side the path we need to follow to stay close to the islands takes us on course dead East. Also, the winds in the region are a bit peculiar. In the northern latitudes, where most of you are, the winds continuously shift their direction in function of the high and low pressure systems that move all the time. If you want to sail in one particular direction you need to wait for the wind to blow in that direction and leave then. But under the tropics there are no complicated stories of moving systems. Here it is fair and hot every day. The main winds here are the Trades Winds, which are relatively strong winds blowing all the time from East. Outside the hurricane season the Trades are very stable and seldom change direction. At best, they calm down a bit. People here like it simple and no they don’t talk about weather down here. In the news, the weather forecast would be the same tape every day! But if the wind comes from the East and this is precisely the direction we want to go, how do we do that? If we had a monohull sailboat we could sail at angle with the wind and make some progress but with a catamaran, forget that. The only thing left are the engines. But there is another problem. The wind creates waves thus both are in the same direction. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Caribbean Sea or any other ocean but sailing against the wind and the waves is like sailing on a bottle cork in a washing machine. The Tide soap here is the salt in the water! After four hours of washing in the ‘Tropic cycle’ we look like two slices of salted bacon straight out of the frying pan! It is simply not possible. Here comes another phenomenon. During the night, a wind called land breeze falls from the mountains of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic) and Puerto Rico islands and partially cancels the Trades Winds. This is our chance to move forward without suffering the Maytag syndrome. Then we put the alarm clock at 3 or 4 in the morning and we start the engines to make progress while the wind is calmer. We look like two teenagers getting out of the house while the parents sleep and we almost whisper in case the wind would wake up if we make too much noise! But then we are in the middle of the night and it is pitching dark and we see nothing. Along the coast, local fishermen put crab pots, which are attached to floats, usually empty cans, at the end of a long line. If one of these lines gets caught in the propellers the damages would be in the four figures. Leaving in the dark we move with our eyes glued to the GPS indicating our position and play Russian roulette with the crab pots.
It is then possible for us to travel 12 to 20 nautical miles each day like this, which represent a ride of 3 to 5 hours at least for the South coast of Puerto Rico. Longer than that and we get caught by the Trades Winds building up around 8:00am. After Puerto Rico, we enter the Virgin Islands with a similar scenario but only during the day and when the wind is mild since we don’t have big islands anymore to cancel the Trades Winds. We may move all the time and change places every day, we still have a pay back when every morning the sun rises and reflects on the mountains of Puerto Rico. The magic beauty of this scenery is worth the pain of getting up in the middle of the night and to fight the waves for many hours.The pictures we show you here are a few examples of the things we could see during our journey along the south coast of Puerto Rico. In order you can see the crowded anchorage of Salina where we were granted a splendid sunset. A bit further, in the village of Hucares we could see those strange flowers opening a few flowers at a time and sheltered in the Palominos Island this little crab paid us a visit by staying solidly attached to the line of the mooring balls we attached to. Let’s say this is not the Horseshoe Crab we had on our anchor chain in Fernandina in Florida and we return it in the water as it would have made a very small hors d’oeuvre!
