The 4 Rules for Surviving Long Passages

We lined up for the mooring ball again. I reached as far as I could with the boat hook; not far enough. I was yelling into the headset BOW TO PORT, BOW TO PORT as we drifted past it, out of reach, a third time. Lance was frustrated, yelling back THE BOAT STILL WON'T RESPOND. We were drifting down onto the neighboring boat in the crowded mooring field. Her crew was alert on deck, hands on hips (this pose is known among cruisers as Bitch Wings, and in this case we deserved it). Our shouting had raised the attention of the other neighboring vessels, their crew were also standing on their decks, eyes wide, enjoying the drama but also hoping not to become part of it. There was a smattering of Bitch Wings in the crowd. Surely we looked like newbies. Or, even worse, credit card captains. A helpful neighbor took pity on us and dinghied out to wait at the ball to help us loop through it.

Night Passage to the Dominican Republic

Brain cells started to sluggishly click into place. There was just not enough wind for Minerva to be fighting us like this. Something basic had to be wrong. That's when we noticed the mizzen sail was still up. Doh! No wonder the boat wouldn't turn - we had a sail on her tail acting like a big wind rudder. A quick release of the mizzen sheet and the sail relaxed, Lance regained close-quarter control and we slowly approached the ball, I handed the mooring line to our new friend on his dinghy. Minerva was secured.

As always, we did the post-mortem over a cold beverage when emotions had calmed and flop sweat had dried. How did we get here? How did we become the day's entertainment?

We broke rules #1, 2 and 3. That's how.

RULES FOR A SUCCESSFUL PASSAGE

1. Keep it Simple. You will arrive tired. Do everything you can in advance. 
1. Study the chart
2. Know the arrival rules 
• Can you rest when you arrive or does Bureaucracy insist that check in  happen immediately
• Have your paperwork in order, ready to grab and go
• Know who to call or where to go (and in our case, where can the dog pee like right now right now right now)
3. Have a backup plan in place in case your planned arrival location doesn't work out
4. Assume everything you need on passage will be difficult to dig out in the dark or when tired, pull it out so it's handy or at least think through how to put hands on it in the dark
2. Sleep when you are not on watch. No reading, listening to music, watching videos, texting, no working on the laptop unless these things actively contribute to making you sleepy. Not tired? Doesn't matter. Lay down and try to sleep anyways whenever you are not actively on watch. Tricks like imagining your body going numb one portion at a time, or acknowledging and actively releasing intrusive thoughts without giving them real attention are helpful.
3. Be Kind. The rest of the crew will also be tired, and brains will not be functioning at 100%. Be gracious. Check one another's work, two heads are better than one.
4. Prepare One-Handed Meals in Advance. A hangry crew doesn't behave well. This one has saved our bacon time and time again when conditions went sideways and hangry started rearing its ugly head and heading towards total assault on rule #3. Most memorable was the passage from Curacao to St. Croix when the autopilot went out forcing us to hand-steer for the last 30 hours, that one-handed meal prep was a lifesaver.

This particular trip was a dream ride along the North Coast of the Dominican Republic. The first day we encountered the typical confused seas of the Mona Passage, and the wind and swell were both much more than predicted but still manageable. By the time we reached the Dominican Republic side of the Mona, the swells started to soften and lengthen into a very comfortable lazy stern swell, sometimes with agreeable current. We traded the jib for a spinnaker and sailed that way all of day #2. Sometime in the night on the home stretch the wind completely died and the spinnaker was put away, the engine deployed and the mizzen tightened down. We came into Luperon that way, after a little over 50 hours at sea. Lance hadn't slept well. We were fixated on the fish pots reported to lurk around the bay entrance the last hour or so and neither of us remembered to take the mizzen sail down (rule #1, should have done it in advance when the sun first came out, and before we reached the fish pots. We were busy drinking coffee instead and completely forgot our trusty mizzen sail on flopper-stopper duty out back).

So we were the afternoon's entertainment. So what. There wasn't any damage, and everyone's been there. Luperon is a tight cruiser community, word has surely gotten around by now about the dorks on Minerva. We'll go to the Thursday mixer and take our lumps.

Spinnaker Sailing is the Best

Dominican Republic and the Mona Passage

The Dominican Republic is beautiful. Mountains, jungles, exotic birdcalls. What's not to love?

Mangroves at the entrance to the Line Caves, in Haitises National Park

Well, they do love to burn things. Lance thinks it's trash, I think it's agricultural burns, could be both or neither. The point is that there's always smoke coming from somewhere. Fortunately there's a lot to do, so we just pick our daily activity upwind of the smoke of the day.

The Line Caves in Haitises National Park were once the home to indigenous peoples. They hid their princess there among the caves from the marauding Spaniards in the late 1400s. There remain quite a few pictographs on the walls today, mostly depicting long-legged birds and the occasional whale.

We are still in the trade winds on the thorny path, which means we are picking our weather windows very carefully so as to fight nature as minimally as possible on our route East and South. From Ocean World near Puerto Plata to Marina Bahia Puerto in Samana meant going East, South and then West for a 20-hour slog. The window we picked should have been mostly sailable, and in fact after turning South we should have had a 16knot tailwind to drive us past the shockingly tall mountains of Samana and West into the Bay, although the weather didn't actually work out that way. We timed our arrival to round the corner and pass over the resident whale population at daybreak, and at first light we found ourselves surrounded by little fishing boats wearing no lights whatsoever. Perhaps they don't want to give away their favorite fishing grounds. Anyways, with the skinny moon and overcast skies, we were sailing in near pitch blackness and it was a surprise to blink in the half-light and find so many surrounding us. Hope we didn't disturb any in the dark. Fortunately we did not meet any whales in the dark, either.

Dominican Treehouse Village near Samana

The Marina Puerto Bahia in Samana is a high-end marina and resort with a couple of pools, laundry facilities, an ATM, a few restaurants, lots of wi-fi and lounging space, and customs officials onsite. One night they even threw a party for the cruisers, something I'm told they do a couple of times a month. Everyone was friendly and we felt quite pampered. All of this was surprisingly affordable. I can see how some folks just decide to stay here forever.

The upstairs pool offered some of the best views. Whales regularly spouted as they passed by at sunset.

An ideal place to tackle the Mona Passage plan.

The Mona Passage is the narrow body of water between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The Caribbean Sea meets the North Atlantic there, the deep trench on the North meets the relatively shallow shoals between the two, both are very mountainous islands. The weather patterns spinning off Puerto Rico regularly cause epic thunderstorms. All of this combines into some potentially hazardous conditions, and the stories the sailors tell around the campfire strike terror into the soul.

You don't have to get far up the hill to find a significantly different way of life; jungles and agriculture replace beaches and bustling villages.

We have been hearing horror stories about this stretch of water for quite some time. Our plan to mitigate the danger is to study carefully the book by the local expert Van Sant, monitor the weather patterns, and to talk with everyone we meet who's done it and lived to tell the tale.

We think we have a strategy mapped out, and it looks like Wednesday afternoon is the weather window to go.

The idea is to sail along the 600' contour to avoid the fishing nets and take advantage of the near-shore night winds, kick away from the land by 8am to avoid the Cape Effect, motor directly into the (hopefully light) winds and seas out past the hourglass shoal, then head South and sail between the little islands into Boca or Puerto Real, arriving anytime outside of afternoon thunderstorm hours.

The Kindness of Strangers

We arrived to Ocean World Marina in the Dominican Republic around 4am. The waves had been building all night and we surfed them right in to the harbor, and lacking further instructions, selected the easy landing spot on the fuel dock. Chloe still won't pee on the boat, so after holding it for almost two full days she was quite happy to jump off the boat for a few minutes. We raised our yellow Quarantine flag, tidied up for a short time and then all three of us passed out flat.

Minerva on the fuel dock at Ocean World

The next morning we were greeted by the Armada, which is the country's Navy and they keep a tight watch on all the goings-on in the harbor. They guided us through the customs process, which involved four different check-ins with different persons in uniform, a small fee paid and a new stamp in our passports. By lunchtime we were refueled and settled into a proper marina slip. The docks are fixed and there's a lot of water motion in the harbor as a result of the unusual North swell that we surfed in. Getting on and off the boat is tricky and requires agility and focus.

We had been warned that the 2-day passages are the hardest, this was our first one. The rumor is that on a longer passage your body settles into a routine by day 3 but the 2-day passages don't allow that to happen yet. We were pretty groggy still, and the late afternoon found us stumbling out in search of food into the open-air bar on the marina the locals lovingly refer to as "the yacht club".

Some rum was consumed.

After a while I could no longer deny the downward pull of my eyelids and Chloe and I checked ourselves into bed. Lance was making friends at the bar and shots were going around.

When I woke up around midnight I found him in the cockpit on the boat, he'd made it back safely. Whew. Without a cell phone, though.

The next morning we began the great cell phone hunt. I checked his phone location on Google Maps and it showed him offshore. Damn Google Maps, probably confused about our location again. When we retraced steps back to the yacht club, we heard the strangest story. The bar owner had been approached by the Armada at the crack of dawn. A fisherman had found a phone/wallet and immediately reported it found to the Armada, but put it in his pocket for safekeeping. The fishing is typically done by noon and he left the Armada to figure out the phone's owner in the meantime.

So Google Maps had it right. The phone was in fact on a fishing expedition offshore.

The Armada came by to check on us twice, the last time it was no less than the Comandante - the big cheese himself - who came out to let us know that "he's got us". Sure enough, when the fisherman came back the Comandante and 3 other Armada staff were standing on the dock to greet him. At least they weren't wearing the big guns this time around - those are going to take a little getting used to seeing.

I'd been following Lance's phone's motion on Google Maps and gave the fisherman a few minutes to settle in before I walked over and introduced myself. In Spanish he told me that on his way in at sunup he had found it on the ground covered by some gravel and was worried about leaving it unattended because his heart is so big. With a grin. He then told me he had caught a marlin, but because it was only 100 lbs he had let it go (with a little quick side eye at the Armada).

I called Lance's phone, so Jose the fisherman could see my face on it, and he said "you are eh Love Taco?". Yes. Yes I am. I blushed. The youngest of the Armada crew allowed a small half-smile. Jose handed over the phone. Everyone stood there for a moment. Another moment. Oh. I opened the wallet side of Lance's phone and took out the biggest bill in Dominican Republic currency there, approximately $20 US. Everyone relaxed. The Armada tipped their hat to me and left, and Jose was instantly smiles and laughs. Tension gone.

So... there are some cultural differences here.

It appears we can trust the guys with the big guns. In the Dominican Republic they check you into and out of each harbor, this way they carefully monitor who is roaming around their country and where. But it's not a bribe thing and it doesn't feel oppressive, it feels very structured in a way to keep us safely having a good time and therefore freely spending money. Despite their official appearance they are very friendly and seem to appreciate the presence of tourists.

The folks at the yacht club tell us phones are left there all the time and this is the first time the Armada has gotten involved. The difference is likely that Lance's phone is also a wallet with all the usual stuff that goes there like credit cards and cash. All of which was still there.

We feel very safe here.

Later in the day, Lance lamented that his wallet had gone marlin fishing without him. We have a new friend in Jose, though, so maybe marlin fishing WITH his wallet is in his future.