Heading southeast from T&C toward Puerto Rico, we had favorable
winds, but they were too light to give us much speed. We hadn't used
the engine much up to this point, so we felt comfortable motoring for
most of the crossing.

We occasionally had spurts of better wind, but it would change
direction from being directly behind us to off our port stern. We
got quite good at hoisting the whisker poles and setting up
variations of the Amel wing-on-wing sail configuration as well as
putting up the mizzen staysail and taking it down. The problem was
that each time we set these up, the wind would shift a few minutes
later. The problem with these sails are that, while they are good in
light wind conditions, they only work with particular directions of
relative wind; when the direction shifts outside these parameters,
the sails have to be pulled down. At any rate, it was good practice
for us working with these sails.

In fact, we had wanted to make land at Rincon on the west coast of
Puerto Rico. This is a neat surfer town we had enjoyed a pleasant
afternoon at when last on Puerto Rico. It would have been a nice
treat for that town to have been our port of entry. Upon examining
our charts, there weren't any attractive anchorages anywhere near to
Rincon (later we found that there was a small anchorage area we could
have used: we made a note of that for when we come back this way).

San Juan it was. Mid-day on our 10th day at sea we turned into San
Juan harbor. The entrance was surprisingly narrow with a good deal
of cross current and surf breaking on either side. A squall came by
at the time we were passing the fort. It was a short trip to the
Club Nautica Marina where we had called to reserve a slip.

Coming ashore turned out to be a disappointment. It took an hour or
so to get the boat tied in properly and attend to all urgent items
that had built up while we had been away. Finally, we headed out to
get our first dinner. Just as we were leaving torrential rain
started pouring down. Even with our rain coats on we were getting
soaks. The roads were overwhelmed with the water and we had to stomp
through 6 inches of standing water. After a long 1/2 hour of this, a
hotel shuttle bus took pity on us and drove us the rest of the way to
the old town where we then looked for a restaurant. Looking back,
the marina we were staying at was really too far from the old town
for it to be a good stopping place for boaters like us.

Next day, we rented a car and took it to Rincon for the day. On the
way we got stuck in a massive traffic jam. A town along the road had
a sort of informal horse festival and it seemed every person on
Puerto Rico had brought their horse and was riding around. As we
found out later, the festival was informal in that there wasn't any
actual venue for it. Riders and their horses were just wandering
around, looking serious, chatting with other horse people, and
stopping at bars. It was an unexpected dose of traditional Puerto
Rico culture.

We had another day of errands where we struggled to locate some parts
we needed, especially some UV-resistant thread to repair a tear in
the genoa. We didn't find half the things we were looking for.
Given the poor location of the marina we were at, the crew was eager
to head out that afternoon for an overnight crossing to the US Virgin
Islands. After a quiet night of motoring, we sighted the islands and
approached Cruz Bay, taking a mooring at the nearby Caneel Bay.

It felt like, after 6 months of sailing, we had finally arrived at
the place we had been working toward much of the time. Not that we
hadn't enjoyed our trip so far, but it was nice to be in the relaxed
Caribbean environment, enjoying sunny weather, calm winds, and the
beautiful islands.

We dinghied into Cruz Bay, had a relaxing breakfast and did a little
shopping. We stopped at the post office to mail the rotary drive
that had failed a few weeks earlier to RayMarine for servicing. Marty
went on his own to hike back to Caneel Bay on his own while we did a
few more errands.

That night we were startled with a loud alarm sounding. It was our
bilge alarm. It seemed the switch that had shorted the week before
had finally given up entirely and the bilge was overflowing as a
result. We turned on the bilge pump and it was not working. This
was getting serious. Nevertheless, we still had the manual bilge
pump, which we used to empty the bilge. Marty and Mark removed the
bilge pump and serviced it, which mostly entailed giving it a good
cleaning and checking the intake and discharge hoses. It seemed the
pump had not been priming itself, but after a good cleaning it
started working just fine. We also took out the bilge pump switch.
Although the switch was part of a complex float device, we found that
the component that had failed was really just a fairly standard
toggle switch. So we motored to Redhook bay to visit the nearest
chandlery we could find. There we bought 2 toggle switches (a
replacement and a spare), some bilge cleaner (to break down the muck
in the bilge that may have been giving the pump trouble), and we
found a full set of maps for the eastern Caribbean... something we
had been looking for some time without much success. RedHook wasn't
much of a harbor so we headed back to Caneel bay, tieing onto a
mooring just after dusk. To get the toggle switch to work, we had
grind down the vaguely oval shaped handle to be much thinner so it
would fit into this other contraption that was specific to Amel.
That took Dana and Mark grinding away several hours at the handle
using a number of Dremmel attachments on our 220v drill. We put the
toggle switch back in and it appeared to work. We also made a point
of waterproofing the switch and the leads as much as possible, using
some liquid electrical tape we had also bought in RedHook. We also
put a proper hose on the water source that had been dripping on the
switch so that water shouldn't get anywhere near the switch in the
future. Belt and suspenders.

We'll describe another project to give a sense of how work on a boat
seems to almost never be straightforward. A crucial part of the
anti-corrosion system for a boat are pieces of zinc attached to the
exterior of the hull. The idea is that zinc operates as a
sacrificial anode and serves as concentration point for
corrosion... protecting all the other metal on the hull. The zinc
disintegrates over time until it is necessary to replace it. The
Northfork has a pair of R5 size zincs on its rudder and it was time
to repace these. The R5's are a pair of flat bottomed disks designed
with a bolt between them: you take out the old zincs and run the bolt
through the rudder and bolt the zincs together. Now that we were
finally in warm waters where Mark could easily swim and check things
out, Mark found the zincs on the Northfork were actually offset from
each other, so they would not work using the bolt mechanism the zincs
are designed with. So Mark dove down and unbolted one of the zincs.
It turned out the zincs are attached with an Amel-specific bolt of
larger size than the zincs hole. So Mark had to dry himself off, get
out the drill and drill the hole larger. Except we didn't have a
large enough drill bit, so Mark had to make do, by kind of routing
around the existing hole, slowly grinding away at the zinc material
growing the hole. Finally, both the zincs had appropriate sized
holes and Mark was finally able to dive back in and attach the new
zincs. A 10 minute project had turned into 3 hours, though Mark was
careful to note the size of drill bit he thought we needed to
simplify this operation the next time around.

The next day was time to say goodbye to Marty, our trusty crew member
of the last 3-4 weeks. He was catching a ferry to St Thomas where he
was catching a flight back to San Juan and from thence proceeding
back to his car in Norfolk where he would then continue his US road
trip that we had interrupted.

On the way back from Cruz Bay in the dinghy, we learned yet another
important lesson. Just we were leaving the bay, the outboard gave
out. This was very frustrating as we had not had any problems with
the outboard up to this point. What is more is that Mark and Marty
had just serviced the outboard and Mark had that sinking feeling they
had messed things up somehow: should they have left well enough
alone? Mark was attempting to quickly diagnose the problem when a
National Park Service boat pulled up and offered to help us. Given
that we had a 1-2 mile row back to the boat, it seemed smart to
accept their help and toss them our tow rope. The nice rangers told
us they weren't supposed to give tows, but that they also weren't
going to just leave us there. Getting back to the Northfork, Mark
unsuccessfully attempted to narrow down the cause of the problem.
Dana insisted that Mark fill the gas tank. This seemed like an
unlikely fix, as the dinghy tank clearly still was 1/4 full.
Nonetheless, the outboard roared to life when Mark filled the tank.
Apparently, the dinghy's fuel tank cannot be allowed to go below 1/4
full or the fuel intake begins to fail. Nice lesson.