Leaving at sunrise!

This is a photo as we pulled out of Salinas early Thursday morning:

On the move

We're back on the move, after sitting for almost two weeks, we hope we remember how to make the boat move! In some ways, when we don't move for a while, we all get the jitters and it feels like we're starting over!

Random graffiti in San Juan

We got Maggie's passport this morning and we're continuing on around the bottom of Puerto Rico, making a pit stop today at an island called "Caja de Meurtos" or Coffin Island. It is supposed to be really beautiful, despite the name and we're hoping for some clean water for swimming. It is also reported to have the best snorkeling in Puerto Rico, so we hope to be able to give a report.

The bay we've been staying in at Salinas seems to be a dead-end, the water is cloudy with no water flowing through it and the bottom of Mehari is covered in barnacles in only two weeks!! So Levi and I will be busy this afternoon scrubbing the hulls once we parked in clean water. It will make a huge difference on our upcoming crossing to the Bahamas, and because our boat is so loaded down with food and people and books, we need all the help we can get. 

We are hoping to leave the corner of Puerto Rico on Sunday, which looks like a good weather window to make the 'Mona Passage' The Mona Passage is rumored to be one of the hardest passages in the Caribbean if not the Western Hemisphere. This is because it is where the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea meet in a very narrow passage. Also, the second deepest section of ocean in the world (second to Mariana Trench in the mid-Atlantic) rises from the ocean floor to only 20 meters in the space of less than a mile! So, if there is strong breezes from the Atlantic, it 'pushes' huge amounts of water up this ramp and creates a swirling mess of waves and currents. We have chose to wait for a very calm day, which we hear will only create 5-6 foot waves instead of 15-20. Fine by us. The passage is only about 80 miles across, but for our boat having to motor in calm weather, means it should be a passage of 18-20 hours. Then we will be through the worst of it and it is still another 2 days up into the first island of the Bahamas. It will hopefully be a smooth 3 days total and from other cruisers we've talked to, and the pictures we've seen, it looks absolutely amazing! We can't wait.

Also, it's been too long in shallow waters for us, and we have caught NO fish in the past month. So we are all rigged up and very hopeful to snag a Mahi or two on the passage. We bought a new bottle of spicy Teriyaki hoping it would change our luck. We are ashamed to report it is as yet, unopened :( 

Thanks for your prayers and support and we'll try and drop another note from the town of Boqueron, Puerto Rico before we leave.

See you!

Old San Juan

So the Hemingway's are on the road......quite a difference going 60 miles an hour instead of 5 knots, you have to keep your hands on the wheel the WHOLE time ;)

We drove up from Salinas, the little town where we're anchored, to the north side of the island, only 50 miles or so, and into the historic sites of San Juan. The island of Puerto Rico has been strategic throughout it's history and the King of Spain once called Puerto Rico the most valuable piece of land in his whole empire. 

There are HUGE fort walls and towers all along the coast that have been well used over the centuries and added to and updated as recently as WW2. Now, the whole place is a US National Park, and it's really well maintained. 

Fascinating history as it was, all the little ones wanted to do was run in the grass. This is not unusual, they have a pretty low tolerance for museums. That turned into a PB & J lunch in a park and we had a great day, exploring the narrow streets around Old San Juan. It reminded us all of our months in the different Greek islands, and we were really tempted to pull up anchor and head back across the Atlantic..............OK, not that tempted, but it did bring back a lot of great memories of exploring Europe.

Puerto Rico

Columbus landed here in 1493, on his second trip across the Atlantic, and most of the first settlements in the new world were all here in the middle of the Caribbean.  In San Juan, the capital, lives 2 million people, and is one of the top 15 metropolitan cities in the Western Hemisphere. Also in San Juan, you are able to walk through 600 years of history in 7 blocks all in a walled fort in Old San Juan. Definitely on the to-do-list!

We first made landfall at a town called Palmas del Mar, Palms of the Sea. It is a resort town, full of condominiums and golf courses. Rachel and I took a hike around the town and we saw tons of empty condos and after looking at some real estate magazines, the prices seemed really low for such an amazing area. If anyone reading this has a spare few hundred thousand dollars lying around, this looks like a great place to invest. All the ingredients are there: lush green hills, sea, beautiful climate, and super clean neighborhoods.  

OK, so we spent one night in the marina, our chart showed an anchorage(free) in the bay, but has been replaced with a marina($$) But, no one was complaining with the first hot showers in I don’t want to say how long, and the kids also spent the day at the pool there and were shocked to discover that not all swimming is in salt water! So they were not so happy when we left the next day.

We scooted around the south side of the 100 mile long island, and after another 30+ miles of sailing, we tucked into some mangroves, finding a pretty calm corner. Our first try was up a narrow river between some mangroves, and coming in after dark, we managed to get stuck on the mud bottom. Engines revving, and going nowhere! So, we dropped the dinghy in the water and with Levi pulling from the front with the 15 horsepower motor, and me revving the main engines on full blast, we slowly unglued ourselves from the muck. Next time, we didn’t try to get too far off into the bushes. ;) 

So, we pulled into Salinas, a very calm and crowded bay about 1/3 of the way around the south side, and looks like we’ll use this as a base for exploring inland. We plan to rent a car while we’re here, and do a major provisioning for the Bahamas, also a trip to the capital of Old San Juan, and a huge mall Maggie is really excited about. If we plan it right, we won’t have to shop again until we reach Florida in late April. We’ve heard from our friends on S/V Imagine, who are already in the Bahamas, we do NOT want to be stuck shopping for groceries up there, very expensive and hard to find anything.

See you soon!