We
left Luperon at 3:00 a.m. this morning, ultimately heading for Samana on the
coast closest to Puerto Rico but it will take us a couple of days/nights to get
there. Everyone says you should try and
take advantage of the “lee” which is a time of night when the winds calm way
down. So, that is why we left at 3:00
a.m. The winds out at sea were 20 knots,
with gusts to 25 knots so when the lee hit, the winds close to the coast drop
to about the 10 knot range, which is very doable. So we motored 6 hours and arrived at Sousa
and as we are trying to drop anchor, one boat with some scuba divers and a
driver come by and tell us we will need to move, we are really in the way of
the scuba divers. Fine, so we move a
little closer to shore and see huge coral head.
We are trying to get around it, without hitting and damaging the coral
head (and the boat) when a large flat bottom type boat (that looks like a piece
of junk) pulls up. I’m thinking, they
want to sell us something…Daniel is concentrating on keeping us off the coral
and I’m on the bow looking for coral.
They just don’t leave and won’t leave us alone. Our broken Spanish is not that great, as you
know, and their broken English was even worse.
After much back and forth with the language, throwing out words we both
understand “commandante” “despacho” “papers” we realize, this guy might be for
real, so we start really paying attention.
We “checked out” in Luperon with the local commandante last night and we
are heading towards Samana. Well this
local, commandante, doesn’t want us staying in his waters – he wants us to
continue on to Samana. The daytime winds
are picking up and it just isn’t a good time to go but he keeps insisting. Daniel explains that we are very tired and
would like some rest so the local commandante has agreed that we can stay, for
6 hours. That would be 3:00 p.m. local
time. I’m thinking we are going to be
having some engine trouble and can’t leave until the lee sets in again, but we
will see.
No comments:
Post a Comment