Four Months Later…

We left Esperanza, on Isla de Vieques (one of Puerto Rico’s three inhabited islands), at a reasonable hour but the wind remained east and even north of east instead of veering southeasterly and, even worse, it never filled in the way the forecast had, well, forecasted.

Ghosting on airs so light that a wave can surge the boat ahead of the whispering wind, we watched the sun dip and fall. The 30-mile trip would not be completed during daylight, but the wide-open bay that was our destination shouldn’t be too hard to navigate in the dark.

It’s the thoughts that carry you away at a time like this. Thinking about what we’re really doing here. Thinking about why it’s been four months since I (Dena) quit my job in Red Hook (on St. Thomas in the USVI) and we’re just now approaching the Big Island of Puerto Rico. Thinking about what it means to have an electric motor and knowing we can’t just steam from fuel dock to fuel dock.

The hook these thoughts are hanging on is slow. We’re not new to being slow. On Nomad, in 2017, we formed a loose association of sailors with folks heading down the ICW, absolutely laughing at the idea that we’d remain close to the Garcia 47 (sailor-besties Kris and Steve, amazing people) or even the Gemini, a 35′ tiny-cat narrow enough to fit in the slips meant for Grand Banks-type powerboats.

When we switched from Nomad to Cetacea, losing 2 feet of deck length but gaining 2 feet of sparred length and 3 feet of beam, we also had to relearn to sail. It wasn’t just the different hull shapes – we went from a slender sloop to a beamy cutter. We learned and learned, and we are sailing this boat very well, but part of what we learned was that we’re not just okay with slow. It’s the preference over motoring, over rushing past ports of interest, and over leaving on a day when we’re feeling like…not.

So we used the Red Hook company mooring longer than we’d intended. The weather was shit and we could use another couple trips to the grocery store. Once we bounced out of Muller Bay (so happy to have avoided any more time in disgusting Vessup Bay), Christmas Cove was a relief. Amazing water to swim in, no stress or pressure, and the pizza barge came back for the season after we’d been there a while! We bounced over to Benner Bay, where the CQR didn’t settle right in the thick grass and we dragged toward the shallows. Thanks to James’ bladder waking him up in the middle of the night, we hove off the danger zone and took the very first of the morning light into the boatyard’s haulout dock so we could load new chain from the chandlery there on the premises.

Before the boatyard opened on Monday, we were gone again, back to Christmas Cove. Our experience of shipping anything to the USVI is a tale of woe far too long and lugubrious for what I feel is a blog about enjoying ourselves so…I’ll just quote Mal from Serenity, “That’s a long wait for a train don’t come.”

A powerboat sank and fouled the waters around us, and we shifted to Charlotte Amelie, the big city of St. Thomas or, as most people call it, Downtown. There, we tried to get into the vibe. Shopping for groceries and hitting the thrift store (we did visit all three on the island before we left), trying tourist-aimed restaurants, and hating on the cruise ships (shits). Listening, whether we wanted to or not, to the extra-loud Soca music that was often just a little too enjoyable to get mad at, even though it went long into the night.

Also, we made the considered (agonizing) decision that it would be okay to wait a couple of weeks so I could get the 50th birthday tattoo I’d discussed with Kristin, the owner and artist at Salt of the Earth.

We kept watching the weather, of course, and felt justified in our decisions because…the Caribbean looked like shit. It was either huge swaths of dead air or waves doubling the period with their height. I don’t mind a 10 foot swell at 20 seconds, but we don’t purposely sail into 10 foot swells that are coming every 5 seconds.

Again, slow. I got tattooed. We got more groceries. We ate at a couple more different restaurants, with mixed results. We watched the weather.

Finally, we realized that we might not get the 10 day forecast that would thrill us into jumping to Panama. Talk of an icy period for the whole east coast of the US gave us the grumps and proved enough to turn our idle talk of cruising Puerto Rico into real talk. We hit the grocery store one more time and went to one last new restaurant…where a couple of women off one of the cruise ships drew us out in conversation that proved so entertaining that they secretly bought our lunch as they left. What a genuine pleasure to be treated to a meal like that!

And then we sailed out of Charlotte and over to Culebra, the other of Puerto Rico’s three inhabited islands. The weather forecast said duck and cover, so we picked a nice bay with a lot of room…and dragged again in the grass! After a reset, we were fine but then moved into the Denton town bay for the usual round of grocery shopping and local-food-trying. This time, we also got a room in an inexpensive guesthouse (for the shower, mostly) and ended up watching some winter olympics on the TV.

Remember the watch-word of this post: slow. We did more than a week of enjoying the protection in Culebra while the weather went nuts up over the continent. The forecasts for sailing to Panama were more dismal than ever, so we did another island hop over to Bahia de la Chiva, Vieques, which was so nice that we spent five days there before bolting for groceries in the island’s only real town on the south coast, Esperanza (mentioned above).

The weather looked really nice for an easy trip from there to the PR big island, so we took off nice and early…and got schooled yet again. The waves weren’t dangerously huge but they were uncomfortable and moving about at all required focus. Eventually, the weak winds left us doing the math: at 2 knots, it would take 5 hours to go 10 nautical miles. The motor draws 20 amps to keep that kind of speed going, but we’re also using the motor battery to run the chartplotter at night (a whole nother story), so we’ll be drawing closer to 25 amps…which adds up to 125 amp hours and we had 180 amp hours available on the propulsion bank. That’s cutting it a little close for our comfort, but…

We motored.

Now, don’t forget, this is a quiet electric motor that, had the wind surged, we could have shut off with a swing of the controller. No diesel exhaust from the weak following wind filling the cockpit and cabin. No rude vibration and peace-killing noise. Even Beluga Greyfinger wasn’t really put out. And he’s easy to put out.

However, this was the opposite of our experience getting to Bermuda, where the wind died during the day while we had solar power to burn. No sun, no wind – finite capacity. We were going to go slow, and we were going to like it. Or not like it but do it anyway.

Losing patience on a slow boat is a pathetic experience because, if you could be going faster, you would be! It’s frustrating, though, to try letting go of the math that seemed reasonable at the beginning of the trip and watch 5pm drift by knowing that you aren’t even close. We eventually set the anchor and settled just after 11pm.

The sun came up on a beautiful bay, Puerto Patillas, and the modest town that encircles it. The water was greenish-clear and the grass was visible at 13 feet deep, which…yep. The next day as the wind came up, we dragged. We used the power we’d made from the sun and wind to reset, but it put us back into the power conservation realm. I went for a reconnoitering swim and found our anchor, once again, lying on top of the grass. It was shallow enough that I could go down and force the tip down through the grass into the underlayer, so we slept well last night.

Now as always the slowest sailors going anywhere, we’re settled in for a day or two so we can gain a better cushion of power before setting off for Salinas, the next stop on our gunkholing trip along Puerto Rico’s south coast. We have a couple more ideas of places to stop before the east coast town of Boqueron, well protected and reputed to be gorgeous water with lots of life, which is actually the whole point of this life’s adventure, right? To revel in the beauty of our world.

We’re still watching the forecasts for a reasonable time to head to Panama, but we’ll keep going east as far as Jamaica if necessary to set us up on a nice broad reach to Central America.

If you know us, you probably already know that we don’t make promises about where we will go or when. And this is why. Sometimes you leave a place (like Red Hook) with the idea that you’ll do a couple of projects and take the first good weather window to the ostensible destination (like Bocas del Toro, Panama), and then you just can’t in good conscience and with good feeling set out the way you had hoped.

So be it. Slow.