Saturday, March 8, 2014 Gilligan's Island, Puerto Rico 17d, 56.7m N; 66d, 52.4m W

After some nighttime showers the day dawned clear and a little cooler, so we hauled aboard our anchor and chain, washing it throughly with the washdown hose on the bow to get off the gooey mud before it went into the anchor locker, then motored over to the fuel dock before they opened for the day, attached our water hose and filled up our water tanks.

We had a pleasant sail of about 30 miles up the coast to Bahia Guanica, the eastern end of which is a national park with a nicely protected anchorage behind Gilligan's Island, so named because of it's resemblance to the island in the old TV sitcom.

The water here was clear, and there are a few cruising boats that stop there on their west or eastward trek along the south coast of Puerto Rico. We anchored in the middle of the bay behind Gilligan's Island to be as far from the mangroves as possible to keep the nighttime bugs to a minumum. We have determined that mosquitoes can track our CO2 emissions upwind in 20 knots of wind for over a mile.

We spent 4 days here, taking an hour each day to do some bottom cleaning. In the photo you can see a small remora helping with bottom cleaning. We saw a manatee one day in the bay, grazing on the grassy bottom. Another evening we dinghied in to a small beach shack for an undistinguished meal. We also met some cruisers here that we ran into in other places later on. The water was warm and clear, although not as clear as in the Bahamas, but was at least 10 degrees warmer here.