Back in the Caribbean
23 January 2013 | Boqueron
Bert Dorrestyn / Fair and E Wind 17kn
Yesterday, January 22, 2013 we arrived in Boquerón in Puerto Rico after crossing the Mona Pass between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and by that we arrived in the Caribbean Sea. Although we saw the Caribbean Sea during our land trip to Santo Domingo a week ago, arriving with Island Girl is for some reason more special. I lived and worked in the Caribbean in the seventies and beginning of the eighties and visited nearly all the Caribbean Islands but never by boat like we are planning to do now. After Dorothy arrived from Indonesia in Suriname I took her on several trips to the Caribbean islands and of course we spent our honeymoon in Curacao and Aruba. That was actually our last Caribbean trip and we are so excited to be back.
We were a little over 2 weeks in the Dominican Republic and with the beauty of the island we could have spent more time over there. While sailing along the north and east coast of the island we saw many beautiful locations that are worth visiting. But we had a plan to go as fast as possible to the Caribbean and to have completed the difficult crossings to get there. The Mona Pass is considered the most difficult one after completing the Gulf Stream between Florida and the Bahamas, the Tongue of the Ocean between the Great Bahamas Bank and Nassau, the Atlantic Ocean passage from Long Island to Provo in the Turks and Caicos and the Turks Channel from Cockburn Harbor in South Caicos to Luperon in the Dominican Republic. We watched the weather windows and it did not look very good until last week Thursday. Then 3 boats arrived in the Ocean World Marina from the Caribbean all with professional delivery crews and all with very bad weather stories. An Island Packet 38, similar to Island Girl, came in with broken equipment in the mast. According to the captain this happened in the Mona Pass by rolling of the boat in over 20 ft. waves. The professional delivery crew had a young lady on board who had no sailing experience and she was so afraid that she was ready to ‘jump ship’ and never go back on board anymore. This made us even more careful to select a favorable weather window. We left on Sunday and the first part of the trip along the north coast of the Dominican Republic was fine. The trade wind, although on the nose, was not too bad. This changed going into the night after we made our first turn to the south/east coast line of the DR. To put it mildly, it was not very comfortable. The next day sailing with just the engine and still wind on the nose was better but still very rough. But then we had the scare of our lives. Something big came out of the ocean very close to the boat and made an enormous splash. We both screamed: “What was that?”.
A humpback whale started a great performance for us around boat. It jumped 6 times next to our boat; dove after each jump under water came up with a big fountain of spray out of its blow hole and made the next jump. Then it moved to the north and started making big splashes with its tail and we saw it doing this until it disappeared over the horizon. In San Antonio, Texas we lived next to Sea World and since our son Robert was employed at Sea World as a water skier, the park was almost our second home and we watched many whale shows in the park with the killer wales. But seeing a humpback whale up close in the wild was absolutely the highlight of our trip so far. Humpbacks come south to give birth just north of Hispaniola, but I did not know they also go as far as into the Caribbean Sea. A comment from any whale experts about this in our blog would be appreciated. We talked on the radio with another sailor who passed us on his way to the north; he saw the whale too and had the same experience we had.
The Mona Pass was basically the easiest part of the trip. When we passed the so called “Hourglass Shoal” we made our turn into the Mona Pass and the wind gave us an opportunity to set the sails and we had a very nice sail to the Mona Island. The “Hourglass Shoal” is relatively shallow part in the ocean, but is still hundreds of feet deep, but the waters these shoals try to contain comes from the Equatorial Current and this means a lot of water and a lot of energy for the shoals to dissipate and you do not want to be in it. After we passed the “Hourglass Shoal” we had to go back to the engine but until 3.00 AM the half moon was out without any clouds in the sky and it was beautiful. After the moon went under it was suddenly pitch black again, but the stars were sparkling everywhere. We arrived in Boquerón, Puerto Rico at 10:00 AM just before the trade wind started to blow.