21st December

19 55 N
70 56 W

Weather: grey sky, rain, cloudy, sunshine, wind 5 to 27 knots NE to SE, waves 4 to 6 feet.

4 TO GO!

A small weather window presented itself so we decided to take the risk and set out for Dominican Republic. The weather looked like being OK at the start of the passage but was going to get a bit hairy towards the end. We had made the decision to do a run straight to DR and by pass the common staging area of Great Sandy Cay as the weather window was very small and if we had stopped at Great Sandy Cay we might not have been able to leave again in the next few days. Having made the decision we knew we were going to be facing about 100NM and if we managed an average speed of 5 knots it was going to take us the best part of 20 hours to reach Luperon, Dominican Republic. Of course we were hoping for better than 5 knots but there isn't much we could about the wind! We had our pre prepared meal and snack box ready to go and at 7am we wondered if we had lost our sanity as it was overcast Ð not enough blue in the sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers (thanks nan for that saying!). Gerry went to haul in the anchor whilst I did my usual steering us out of the anchorage party trick only this time the heavens opened and we had to put lights on and follow the chart plotter track out as visibility was down to nothing. We quickly cleared the harbor and turned towards our track for Great Sandy Cay (although we weren't going there we had to go past it) once into deeper water the rain let up and we were able to put out both our jib and staysail which moved us along at a steady 5.5 knots, motor assisted. It was so cold that we had to put tee shirts on over our swimmers ( I threw that in for you lucky people living in the UK. Bet you feel sorry for us Ha ha!) any how there were a couple of spectacular rainbows as we left South Caicos, I took photos but sadly they never show quite what the eye could see. So our day continued with almost 4 seasons in one day - we were just missing the snow! We had patches of squally rain, grey skies, black storm clouds, hints of sun shine - mostly glints on the water which were teasingly just ahead of us most of the time. The winds varied greatly ranging from 5 knots up to 27knots depending on the squalls going past or in 2 cases hitting us. The waves corresponded to the squalls as well and we pitched when they hit and went back to calm seas after they had passed. Our jib was deployed, reefed, redeployed, furled away, deployed again ad infinitum; the stay sail was out fully for most of the time, I think we only furled it away once; the engine was on for a while, off for a while, back on for a while etc. all in response to the changing weather conditions. I mentioned that we had based our trip on 5 knots well it was a fair average, we got down to 3.5knots ( put engine on) and up to 7.9Knots (engine off, reef the jib) but we mostly made an average of 6Knots. We saw one pod of dolphins but very little else to keep us visually occupied. We passed Great Sandy Cay and turned our track for direct path to Luperon and continued to bash through waves then surf down the swell. The sailing was actually very good, just a little too inconsistent to be great. Of course we had the fishing line out, but to no avail, the fish obviously don't like the lure we have on the line! We took turns in catching a few hours' sleep when we could manage it. Priss did the most sleeping for the entire trip but came out into the cockpit and curled up on my lap for the later part of the crossing - when it got really rough. Due to the reasonable speed that we had managed we were going to arrive in Luperon at about 3am - not the dawn arrival that is preferable for negotiating the channel into Luperon Harbour. When we were 15 NM from Luperon we got hit quite hard by horrid wave action which had us slow right down and pitch pretty badly, this was the worst part of the entire 100NM. At around the same time I spotted a whole raft of red flashing lights which appeared to be some way off, we couldn't make out what they were - could they be fishing drift lines? Lights marking a reef? Lights from shore? It was hard to decide and there was nothing marked on the chart plotter about them. We tried to skirt them as Gerry was convinced they were drift net lights, I thought they were on land as they didn't change position, half a guess who was right in the end (never doubt Nicky!) There was next to no moon so it was quite dark at the entrance to the harbor and we decided that we wouldn't try to negotiate the channel in the dark as we were aware from our previous visit here that there are some very shallow spots and sand banks, so we detoured to a bay next to the harbor and anchored there until dawn and decent light, snatching a couple of hours sleep before entering the harbor. In all it took us the 20 hours we had expected it to take to reach Luperon and less fuel as we were able to sail for a good deal of the way. We had arrived.