Frances and Ian - the new crew caught at Beer O'clock. A bar with a view - of Shadownere
Frances and Ian have come for a month of diving and sailing - from Puerto Rico to St Lucia which only leaves me an easy 100 miles from Grenada when my next crew arrive (Eamon and Kieran) It is great to have crew aboard.
Heading East we move slowly - three hours motoring a day. Here are Ian and Frances having a beer in Jobas, a tiny place on the South coast of Puerto Rico
We stop many times - From Ponce to the Isla de Casa del Muertos - Island of Coffins (7 miles) to Salinas (15 miles) to the Cayo del Boca (3.6 nm) to Jobas (4.9 nm) to Puerto de Patillas (17 nm) to the Marina Del Mar (16 nm) but at least we didn't have to motor into headwinds for too long.
I take Frances on a training dive - 10 feet under a pier where we see a lot of fish
A lion fish - scourge of the Caribbean since they spearheaded a hostile invasion from the Pacific - if only I had my speargun with me then I would spearhead them!
Nice yellow ones...
And then we move onto the nearby town of Salinas - a marina in among the mangroves. really good holding in 10 feet of mud. The old marina building got trashed in the hurricane
We leave here and motor a mile to find a slightly sheltered drop off to dive at the Caya de Borca. The fish life is good but the vis is poor - I think a feature of the mangroves nearby is that the mud permeates the water. Good experience for Frances though as she has to deal with current. She prevails,
Salinas marina office also has a nice light... I had enjoyed making a light out of copper pipe depicting three (fisherman's) anchors for the cottage back home before leaving. I feel a hypercube design coming on....
Moving further East to Jobas we find many small flat roofed houses - here is the floor plan of one, the rooms are only 8 feet by 10 for the biggest
We also find Salinas has a good church and we eventually find somewhere to buy some stuff - in a "Pharmacy" which also sells some miscellaneous things ( we are out of dishwasher fluid) We never did find the supermarket.
As I explained in a previous blog, there are light or no winds from 6 am to 9 am most (though not every one of the) mornings and motoring East then avoids beating to windward (gentlemen don't beat to windward). Hence we have three or four early morning starts to get to the East coast of Puerto Rico. Up at Dawn. in bed by dusk.
The last stop on the South coast is the Puerto del Patillas - many small homes, two or three nice bars and a beach. The bar above has a few live chickens. As well as beer, they serve fresh battered fried chicken pieces, I wonder if this hen knows just how fresh....
One of the larger houses in Puerto del Patillas - note the security grills... and the nice plants
The other end of the spectrum are glorified mobile homes
But they have a nice beach...
I liked the palm trees and the moon in this shot
The anchorage is among coral reefs - I box the anchorage and drop the anchor in the middle of the box - I have two feet under the keel and the coral reefs (and a bigger reef to seaward) kill the swell - though we do rock a bit at 5 am when the wind dies right away.
We turn the corner and see a different side of PR - much bigger more luxurious houses
The country is more green too - the North of the East end of PR has a tropical rain forest - I guess it is green too. We round the corner and head for a marina - at Puerto del Mar, I had suffered a brain fart as I had thought I was heading for the marina at Puerto del Rey. It is in the North of the West end of PR, Marina del Mar is at the South end of West PR. They are only 20 miles apart and I need to figure out where to leave the boat in April when 5 of us are coming and going from San Juan airport. More research needed. I know Target car hire allows pick up from the airport and drop off at this marina, and vice versa,
Fascinating place - the marina is in the middle of a very large resort - multiple apartments, big flash cars and golf courses, houses with their own dock as well as the marina. We get a taxi to the supermarket - $30 round trip, the town of Humacoa - a real place full of real people unlike the resort. The resort is the regularly spaced houses below
The real town of Humacoa is much more interesting.
This real place has interesting electrical wiring!
But good churches (and out of date Christmas decorations)
The marina is trying hard to build itself up, currently not busy but offering BOGOF deals (Buy One Get One Free) = pay for a night and get an extra night free. Buy two weeks and get another two weeks free! but it is a $80 a night marina - ($40 with the "deal") their new clubhouse is soon to open and they do not yet know what the new prices will be. I will email them from the ABC islands in March to see.
Their new clubhouse should be superb, They also have a pool and infinity pool. as well as showers, laundry and Wifi. Their staff are extraordinarily nice - Roberto and Salvador, thank you - they ran up and down the pontoons in golf buggies on occasions! they also asked us to help catch a boat with no engine that had just left and was now getting towed into harbour after radioing the marina. In the end the yacht got their engine going again and headed on. Nice to know there was a support structure ready to help a boat in trouble.
We stay are two days, fuel up, water up and head East to the Spanish Virgin island of Culebra at 6 am. It is not far and we do not mind motoring into the jobbly swell for 3 hours. Onward and upward, the virgin islands await.
Keep her lit Ian nice reading your blogs
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