We spent Christmas week bouncing between the inner harbor of Dutch St. Maarten (where the better provisions are), and the more beautiful anchorages on the french side of St. Martin. I made a full Christmas dinner and we had champagne for New Year’s eve with new friends. We snorkeled in Grand Caisse a lot, and one day we saw an octopus. It was the first one we had seen in the wild in all that time. We followed her around for a long time. It was amazing how she could not just change her color but her shape too. Definitely a highlight of our trip.
We were watching for a good weather window to make our crossing of the Anegada passage between St. Martin and the British Virgin islands. As we waited, I did a little side trip to Anguilla, a short ferry ride from St. Martin. It was another lovely island with lovely beaches and lovely people. It is also the favourite Caribbean island of my aunt and uncle, so I made sure to send them pics of me eating lunch at their favourite restaurant there.
We finally got our weather window on January 1st, and set sail at about noon to avoid getting in while it was still dark. We decided to skip the Virgin Islands all together to save time and headed straight to Culebrita, 130 NM away, about 18 to 20 hours. We encountered an extraordinary number of cruise ships and cargo ships on the way, and had to be watching AIS constantly and making sure no one was on a close course with us.
At one point I was watching a Disney ship when it lit off an amazing display of fireworks! Then at 3 AM my depth alarm went off and freaked me out. The sudden crazy maneuver I made in a stupid attempt to turn back into deeper water woke Doug up, (oops). It must have been a school of fish because we were in hundreds of feet of water, but when you are tired your mind is not very reliable and your fast decisions are sometimes pretty stupid. A few hours later we arrived at the small island of Culebrita, off the coast of Puerto Rico, and after we dropped anchor we got some much needed rest. Later on we did some snorkeling before having a lovely dinner with friends we had met in the Dominican Republic who were anchored next to us.
We now had a plan to pick up our friend Tony on the west coast of Puerto Rico on January 7th to help us get back to Florida faster. So now we were really on a schedule! We pulled out of Culebrita on January 3rd, just hopping over to Culebra, another island, for a night. There I discovered that while we had been heeling over for about 18 hours of sailing a leaking jar of honey had spread its contents through the entire spice shelf. What a mess! On the 4th we went to the island of Vieques, which we had missed on the way through the first time. It had lovely snorkeling but we didn’t make it to land. Next time!
From Vieques we were now feeling the stress. Tony would be here in days and we were still over a hundred and 15 NM away from our meeting point. We set off and made it to Salinas, closing 50 miles the next day. The day after that we covered the remaining 65 NM in amazing time with good wind. At one point we had our speed over ground up to 9.5 knots. We arrived at the marina earlier than expected, and beat Tony there by a day. This worked out great because it allowed us a much needed rest day and Tony a day to rest from his flight.
Having Tony along meant that we could do longer trips with more overnights while each of us could still get rest. We decided that we would go straight from Puerto Rico to the Bahamas in a leap of about 450 NM. We set off in the early morning of January 8th. The seas were heavy but the wind was not great so we were doing a lot of motor sailing. At some point after we were past the worst of the Mona Passage, and just coming into night our shaft started to get really hot. We turned off the motor and continued on under sail power.
It didn’t seem reasonable to continue such a long trip without being able to depend on the motor so we changed course for Samana on the east coast of the Dominican Republic. Tony and I fought with light wind all night, adjusting our course and adjusting our sails trying to get at least a reasonable speed out of it. We arrived there at 9 AM on January 9th, and dropped anchor outside of the marina while we called them to see if they had space. We moved onto the dock at about 10AM and went to sleep. We had travelled just 152 NM, a far cry short of our goal, but better to be safe than sorry.
