The Mona Passage, perhaps less famous than the Mona Lisa, is the stretch of sea between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic , it's about a one hundred and fifty miles from here, in Puerto Real, to Samana, on the north east coast of the DR. To cross this sea, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea meet, will take us beyond sight of land for the first time ever. All our sailing so far has been in sight of land which makes this coming voyage a bit special. The Mona Lisa has an enigmatic smile, whilst the Mona Passage has an enigmatic reputation as a difficult and dangerous bit of water to cross, although we've heard stories of easy crossings as long as you choose the right conditions.
The weather has changed, these days are dogged with heavy showers, and leaden skies that roll out into the Mona Passage in the afternoon and early evening. According to Bruce van Zant in his "bible" for cruisers, 'A Gentlemans' Guide to Passages South', you need to give these a wide berth as they can get pretty nasty, so we'll head north along the coast of Puerto Rico and turn west once these weather systems are south of us, that's what Bruce advises. One of the problems with reading Bruces' book is that all the information concentrates on a voyage going east, and we're going west.
Both of us have a sense of apprehension, but we've checked the forecasts over the last week, and our original plan of leaving Thursday has slipped to Saturday. That looks to present the best chance of light winds, moderate seas and if we're lucky we'll miss the rain as well. However it's going to be an adventure, just the two of us, and Picaroon out there on the deep blue sea, and out of sight of land. And it is deep, just north of where we'll be sailing, through the night is the Puerto Rico trench. Do you know how deep it is? I looked at it on the charts yesterday, it's 26,000 feet deep in places, that's almost as deep as Everest is high. We won't sail over that bit but never the less we'll be in seas that are affected by these tremendous depths of water.
There are tidal rips around the hour glass shoal that we'll be giving a very wide berth, and the most schizophrenic currents that flow south, sometimes, then north at others, seemingly there's no way to predict what they will be doing, or when they'll reverse. All this makes us nervous. We've stowed the liferaft where it's easy to get to, and we've got the flares handy. There's some emergency rations on board and lots of sachets of water that will keep us from dehydrating for a few weeks. We've also just bought a new hand held VHF with GPS and a button called DSC that broadcasts your distress call and position to the coast guard, yes I think we're prepared for the worst. Jackie is making a flask full of hot soup for the nights' sailing. It sounds as though we're heading round Cape Horn, not a short hop across the Caribbean of 150 miles, but hey you can't be too careful, this is the ocean, and good old Mother Nature can play some fiendish tricks, so like good boy and girl scouts we're going to be prepared.
My impressions of sailing the Caribbean we're of tranquil dappled turquoise bays, or sailing on glassy seas, just ever so slightly heeled over, with a cold beer and a nice tan. All the exciting and dangerous voyages took place in the southern oceans or the north Atlantic. I never read any hairy stuff about the Caribbean, so maybe we're blowing this Mona passage out of all proportion but better safe than sorry.
The next posting to this blog will be from Samana in the DR as we don't have any fancy satellite connections to update on the way. For about 24 hours we'll be out of communication with the world, just me, Jackie and Picaroon, it's called adventure. I just read that to be a real adventure there has to be some element of danger, some possibility that all may not go well, some anguish, some lows, and, hopefully highs. They never taught us in our courses how to do this, but then you can't learn how to adventure, you've just got to go for it. We call it adventure before dementia.
(Skippers note: Perhaps it's the other way around - gotta have dementia to adventure!)