Ponce to Fajardo, Puerto Rico

March 2, 2014

Another all night motoring trip to get from Ponce to Fajardo.  The wind was on the nose of the bow of our boat all night, so there was no chance of bringing out the sails.  The good news was we were close to shore all night and enjoyed the view of the lights of Puerto Rico as we motored down the coast.  We arrived in Fajardo just before sunrise.  We had breakfast, dropped the anchor and went to sleep.  We are in an anchorage just at the mouth of the entrance to a marina that holds up to 1,000 boats.  It is huge.  We didn’t go into the marina, it’s about $50 a night to stay there, we just anchored.  The cool thing was, being at the entrance, on a beautiful Sunday, you were able to see about 999 of the boats come and go.  It kept us entertained most of the day.  We’ve had our first “boat issue” in that our windlass isn’t working.  The windlass is the motor powered mechanism we use to raise and lower the anchor.  Daniel has raised and lowered the 65 pound anchor with 100 pound of chain numerous times now and since we are now in a port with a lot of marine parts available he wants to buy a replacement.  I told him raising and lowering the anchor was good exercise, but when he suggestion I partake in the exercise regime, I decided we needed new windlass parts, too.  Tomorrow we go in search of new parts and provisioning for our company coming.

At one point in the afternoon some local people came to shore and brought some horses with them.  I watched them off and on for an hour or more and they were leading the horses (without saddles) into the water until they were neck high.  They would walk them around a while and then hop on their backs.  We are assuming they were trying to “break” the horses.  Anyway, it was an interesting way to spend the afternoon. 

 

As it got to be dark, we came inside and suddenly realized, we are back in the USA, I bet we have tv stations we can pick up.  We haven’t seen television since the day before we left Charleston.  We were excited.  We flipped on the tv and started changing channels.  We picked up no less than 10 channels, all in Spanish.  Not one English speaking channel.  We watched a cooking show in Spanish and then a “cop show” with a german shepherd dog in it (he even barked in Spanish).  What a fun night.