4th January

17 55 N
66 13 W

Weather: cloudy, wind 5 to 10 Knots NE, waves 2 to 4 feet.

After discovering that we weren't going to be able to hire a car until Tuesday we made the decision to not stay in Ponce but move further along the coast. We had to wait until 8am for the fuel dock to be open, so we busied ourselves putting stuff away and generally tidying up the boat then just before 8 am we untied ourselves from the slip and backed out slowly so as not to hit anything on the way. We motored the short distance around to the fuel dock to find that a 64foot boat was tied up there and there was no sign of the dock master who does the refueling, not a great start to the day. We did a drive past and yelled out to the guys on the boat asking if they were waiting for fuel - yes, they were. As we spoke the fueling guy appeared and got organized with filling the boat for these guys who had been waiting, we did several circuits of the harbor whilst they refueled. When they were done and pulling away from the fuel dock they asked if we had come out of slip number 43, we had, and apparently, they were going into that very slip - guess it was an exchange program! Anyhow we pulled up alongside the fuel dock and quickly topped off our two tanks, taking on 88 gallons of the cheapest fuel so far at $2.89 a gallon, then it was time to get underway. Gerry took charge of moving us off the dock whilst I tidied away the fenders and dock lines; the fuel dock is quite shallow and we managed to ground the boat momentarily but it was easily moved off the shallow spot with a push from the dock master. We headed out into the channel and turned left - interestingly the bay was named Bajo Tasmanian - we had been at home the whole time! The wind was still asleep ( lucky thing) so we had very little breeze and even less waves so we started out motoring. It didn't take too long for some breeze to kick in and we then flew the white flappy things for as long as we possibly could , only reverting back to motoring when we got close to Boca De Infierno where we planned to anchor for the evening and then continue our journey when the afternoon sea breeze dropped off again. We had discussed options with Haydn and Marina for the onward journey, they were going to continue on through to the US Virgin Islands without stopping anywhere else as Haydn was on a time limit due to work commitments and would be flying out of the Virgin Islands on the 13th and didn't want to miss what might the only weather window to get him there in time. Gerry and I talked about stops along the way if we didn't want to do the longer journey in one hit but were playing it by ear a bit, neither of us were particularly fussed about more stops but we weren't going to beat ourselves up. On arriving at Boca De Infierno we dropped our anchor, had a quick late lunch and an afternoon nap, ready to take off again later in the evening. Hayden and Marina were leaving at 5pm which we thought was a little early for the wind to have died down, Gerry had thought 9pm would be a better time however by 5.30pm the wind was dropping and the weather window was getting smaller so Gerry made a snap decision that we would leave right then, destination uncertain!
The sun set photo was snapped as we left the anchorage and unfortunately was behind some low lying bushes but look closely - there is a green circle around the sun, I'm sure that would have been the flash if it had been at sea level but I have to keep searching still for the elusive Green Flash!