Friday, March 21, 2014 We pulled up our anchor and headed out to sea from Salinas at 11:30 pm under clear sky, half moon and light easterly breeze. We had an easy upwind motorsail of 52 nautical miles to Vieques Island, arriving off the village of Esperanza on the south coast by 8am. We anchored in the north bight of the small bay called Puerto Real. It was pretty rolly here, but we were close to shore with a fine beach and a lovely small village. This was our first anchor event with the new Rocna. We dropped it in 15' of water right into a grass bed. It set immediately. I snorkled over and dove to have a look: it had buried itself in less than it's own length. Our old anchors would have filled with weed and failed to set. They were both good in sand or mud, but any anchor is.

John and Cassandra on Topanga came in shortly after us and anchored nearby. We all hit the beach for a nice walk and swim, then in the evening they came over for a shared dinner and we played Taboo.

Saturday morning, we launched our kayak and took Toby to the beach for our walk. We wandered into town and decided to have brunch in one of the sidewalk open-air restaurants. We chose Bananas for no particular reason and were rewarded with a bowl of perfectly prepared PEI mussels in a white wine sauce that was fabulous. In the afternoon, we saw John and he needed help repairing his gasoline powered portable generator. I told him to bring it over, and we were able to get it going, after the usual skinned knuckles and difficulty in reassembly. This was a Chinese unit, and it had been poorly designed for maintenance, so we had a couple of miscues in the process, but in the end, we managed to solve the original problem with an improvement in the part. We spent about 4 hours on this project and John insisted on taking us out to dinner as thanks, and that turned out to be a great idea, because we had another outstanding meal, of Paella, at a shoreside restaurant called Billi, in Es peranza. This little town looks like it makes a lot of its living on young American and Puerto Rican tourists, so there are a lot of services available, like rental kayaks, motorbikes, snorkeling gear, horseback rides as well as a variety of lodging.