Many Miles

How many miles have we come since our last post, exactly 1,953, yep we have covered the entire distance we did crossing the Atlantic and then some in just a month and a bit. To give you an idea of the ground we have covered I have put a chart below with our track.

 We arrived in Martinique direct from Suriname. We stayed to catch our breaths, restock our food stuffs and wait for friends to catch up with us. But quite quickly after our friends arrived we had to be on our way. We had alot of miles to cover before December 21st, which was when our friends from Canada would be arriving in Nassau, Bahamas.

Once we left Martinique we made a bee line for St. Martin. Though wind and weather had us changing plans and stopping off in St. Kitts for 24hours while we waited for the weather to settle for a crossing to St. Martin. 

St. Kitts was a pleasant stop, we anchored just outside a partially built marina where we caught up on sleep and were able to stretch our legs ashore. We were surprised at how green and "northern" the southern part of the island looked with its steep rocky hills and bleeched talled grass and green hillsides.

St. Martin was a short stop to provision at the new Carrefour, once the Fresh Mart, and get a bit of fuel and water. It was strange being one of the few boats in Marigot Bay, St. Martin anchorage. The last time we were here it was packed and we had to be very careful how much chain we put out when we anchored, but since we arrived so "early in the season" as everyone keeps telling us, the anchorages are fairly empty, nice change. 

All provisioned we left St. Martin in the evening to begin the overnight trip to the BVIs. The passage was uneventful. The children slept well and John and I took our turns at the helm. Thankfully it was a lovely starry night with nice winds from the east. We actually made such good time we arrived at Virgin Gorda in the dark and had to wait offshore for the sun to rise before we headed in through the buoyed passage to anchor first near Tillerman's Marina then shift to Gun Creek to check in, then on to the Bitter End for the night.

The Bitter End was a nice place, though expensive and fairly deserted. We only stayed 24 hours, enough time to clear into the country and go for a swim, before we headed off to "The Baths" to do some snorkeling among the very large volcanic boulders lining the coast. A unique spot for a day stop. 

Then on to Puerto Rico, where things went rather pear-shaped! 

We arrived at Puerto Del Rey Marina in the early morning. Everything went as you would expect upon arrival at a marina. But as the sun reached its zenith, a couple of black booted, uniformed and weapon carrying Customs and Border Protection Agency people stepped onto our boat and all of a sudden our excitment for being in Puerto Rico was washed away with just a few words. "Where is your visa?" 

Those four words resulted in a 7 hour long bureaucratic nightmare ending with a $500 visa for John, tired, hungry and grumpy children and an unpleasant feeling about the whole of the USA and her protectorates.    

So, what happened. We thought we had the correct visas for John and the kids. We had gotten ESTA visas for our trip to Canada this past summer and they were still valid. We thought that this was all we needed. Turns out we were wrong! Here's what we discovered after we arrived...

Things to Know About Puerto Rico If You Are a Foreign Registered Vessel, (other than Canadian):

• Puerto Rico is a protectorate of the United States and therefore the same rules that apply to foreign vessel in mainland USA apply to Puerto Rico.
• You MUST HAVE a B-2 Non-immigrant Visa BEFORE you arrive in the country. You can obtain said visa from a US Embassy that offers visa services. You are generally required to attend an interview before your visa is granted, if it is granted. When we applied the cost was $160 for each visa. Yes, children need them too, no matter how young they are.
• You need to have a cruising permit to cruise in US waters, but the officials we spoke to at Customs and Border Protection could not definitively tell us whether we could have gotten this permit before arriving in Puerto Rico or not.
• You must report your whereabouts to the CBP every day by calling a toll free number that only seems to work if you have a US Sim card, you can obtain local numbers too, but you need to ask for them specifically.
• The Customs and Border Protection personelle professed to us that there is a lot of confusion surrounding the entrance and procedures for foreign vessels in US waters. Therefore you cannot expect to always get the same answer from every official, even within the same office. For example, we were told by two officials who cleared us into the country to call and report our location every day, when I did call the following day to report our location I was told to report to them only when we moved jurisdictions, how I would know when I moved jurisdictions I am not sure, and another told us to call only if we moved our boat. We were asked to email their help desk and make a formal complaint about our experience as the people in the office agree that the whole thing is confusing and something needs to be done to help simplify and clarify the process.

John pointed out, he could get a $15 ESTA online, fly to any US city, get off the plane, rent a car then go anywhere he wanted without any checks, but if he arrives by boat he has to have a full visa, and he also has to call in every 24 hours. It just doesn't seem logical. 

In any event, the people of Puerto Rico were lovely, friendly and super helpful. Our favourite part of the island was the Eastern side. It is far less developed and perhaps because of this the locals are far more hospitable to visitors. 

Other stuff to know

• Groceries and car hire are cheap. We bought a beautiful ham for $11 at a local grocery store just before Thanksgiving and we found the exact same brand of ham in the Bahamas for $50.
• Getting your propane tank is easy and inexpensive if you are able to rent a car or take a taxi to one of the many filling sites around the island.

We cleared out at Mayaguez, a harbour on the western side of the island, and were making ready to cross the Mona Channel to Dominican Republic. We had read and heard that the Mona Channel was a particularly nasty bit of water and you really needed to be careful when you attempted to cross it. We had checked the weather and it looked good, it was a flat calm, the seas were like glass, it looked like we were in for a long but calm motor across. But by the time we had reached nearly half way to the Dominican Republic there was a nasty short tall chop over the water, and the wind was gusting to 30 kn. The girls were seasick, Adam was seasick and I, who never gets seasick, was too. Thankfully John remained unaffected by the sea state. With another squall looming on the horizon, a few 40 kn gusts and the state of the crew we decided to turn tail and make way for Puerto Nuovo.

Puerto Nuovo is a wonderful place to anchor. It is a shallow bay with a little yacht club offering water, laundry, wifi and restaurant food to visiting yachtsmen. It was our little heaven as we waited for the weather to pass. And at $1 a load for wash or dry, we did all of our laundry. 

The evening after our first attempt to cross the channel we headed out again. This time to greater success. It wasn't until we got close to Punta Cana Marina, that we realized that the swell was too big for us to safely be able to get into the narrow and shallow entrance to the marina, so we bore away and headed for Samana Bay arriving in the late evening. We were able to drop anchor fairly easily and went straight to bed, knowing that in the morning we would be greeted by a boat full of local authorities. 

And we were. By 8AM a boat of 8 men arrived and came on the boat. John filled in a couple of pieces of paper, but mostly they were all there for a tip, local speak for money, which we gave, no sense in getting on these guys bad side. John then later went ashore with a "fixer" to finish up the paperwork. 

Things To Know About The Dominican Republic:

• "Tips" are a part of life here, you can give them or not but in our experience, giving a tip to the person "helping you" makes your life easier and potentially safer.
• Staying in a marina is a relatively cheap and safe option if you are not comfortable paying a local guy on the shore to "watch your dinghy and boat" while you are ashore.
• Do not leave your dinghy in the water at night, it will not be there in the morning.
• While locals formalities may feel a hassle or intimidating, people are really very friendly and helpful once you share a laugh with them. 

We stayed for a few nights in the Puerto Bahia Marina to celebrate Lucy's 8th birthday and wait for the right weather to make a move. It is a great marina, it was very quiet while we were there. They had two swimming pools for us to use and the WiFi was quite fast. Laundry was free because the coin operators didn't work.



There are very few anchorages on the Northern side of the Dominican Republic that can accommodate our 8 ft draft so we opted to head straight from the  Puerto Bahia Marina to the Turks and Caicos. The passage took us roughly 36 hours arriving in the late evening as the sun was going down. We picked up one of the many white mooring buoys that line the north-eastern coast of Grand Turk and made fast for the night. The following morning John and Adam went ashore near the cruise ship docks to clear in at Customs and Immigration which was located near the airport. A local truck driver offered to take John and Adam there. 

Things to know about Turks and Caicos:

• Provisioning is very difficult! 
• It is hard to get ashore in Providencials and I would recommend, if you have a boat with a small enough draft and time to head to one of the marinas just for ease of access. 
• If you do get ashore to provision it is VERY EXPENSIVE! 
• While John arrived during normal custom and immigration operating hours he was still charged overtime because we had arrived in the country outside office hours the night before. They also wanted to charge us overtime to clear out because we intended to leave the country on a Saturday which was not a normal working day for them. John did not try to argue the point, after all, they could make our lives very difficult if they wanted too. 

While we had little interaction with locals and never saw another cruising boat while at these islands we really enjoyed our very short time here. It was an entirely different seascape for us. The water is very shallow, but also extraordinarily clear. While sailing over the area between Grand Turk and Providencials we could see the bottom clearly. The squid zooming around, sting rays looking for conch, little clusters of coral reef fish around very small colonies of coral and sharks! We saw two in one day, they were not close enough for us to identify but close enough to know they were sharks. 

For me the most amazing feature of this landscape was the sudden change from shallow to 2000 m deep, it was like dropping off the edge of the world into a vast deep blue abyss with who knows what lurking along the edges waiting to feed...

So, on ward and upwards we continued on our way to Bahamas. However with December 21st fast approaching it was a gallop up the island chain to Nassau. I have summarized the highlights below.

Bahamas: South to North

- Mayaguana, Abraham Bay. Protected but shallow anchorage. Beach access but littered with old fishing gear and other rubbish, 

-San Salvador, lovely white sand beach littered with large old conch shells, easy to take a dinghy onto and town is within walking distance. Very small shop with nothing much but icecream and beer on main street. The town architecture was reminiscent of East Coast wood homes.

-Long Island, two anchorages both secluded, the one at the north end looked like it was a cruise ship destination, very strange vibe.

-Highborn Island, private island, anchorage is protected from most wind directions, small shop in the marina resort complex. They will take two of your garbage bags for $5 a piece, but then it is $25 a bag after that, they also have ice and sharks that hangout at the end of their boardwalk, we saw one lemon shark and lots of nurse sharks waiting to be fed by people gutting their catch. 

-Nassau via the Yellow Bank, we had gotten used to sailing with just a couple meters or less under our keel by this stage and were very pleased to tie up at Nassau Harbour Club Marina and Hotel for a few days before our friends arrived from Canada. 

And so that should bring us up to Christmas. A long post but with many miles covered, next post will be Christmas with the Lawrence's.