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

Puerto Rico and the End of the Thorny Path

After one of my Facebook posts someone asked me what the "thorny path" meant. I probably should have detailed that out at some point, so please accept my apology and let me explain.

Sailing is preferable if the wind is coming from your side or somewhere at your back. Same goes for waves. The more in front of the mast either of these items the bouncier the ride.

The third variable: current, can generally be used to a sailor's advantage if the trends are predictable.

Impromptu Buddy Boats on the Mona Passage with us. We weren't the only folks that spied a weather window and made a run for it. We established a VHF channel to discuss strategy, right about here we'd decided to push further away from shore to find calmer wave action and avoid encountering fishing equipment in the dark.

Going from Florida to the Caribbean means going directly against the trade winds, which almost always blow from the East, stronger in the afternoon. The current and waves in this region also generally come from the East, or slightly North of East. And there's a lot of East to be conquered to get from Florida to the Caribbean. So the wind, waves, and current are generally fighting any progress. There's a lot of motoring - the sails don't get out much. That's the essence of the thorny path. Lots of motoring and regular beatings.

Boqueron Still Life on a Monday morning

Experienced sailors all say the same thing about the thorny path "did it once, won't do it again", and instead sail waaaaaaaaay out of the way in a really big tack out into the open Atlantic Ocean, and sail back into the the BVI on Longitude 65. This method is called "taking the I-65". But we wanted to experience the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and also Chloe still won't pee on the boat making regular landings important, so we decided we'd give it a whirl. After all, others have survived, how bad could it possibly be?

The Fort at Old San Juan

We planned all our hops through the Bahamas trending South and East, and then fought our way along the Dominican Republic coast, where we perched on the East side of the island and looked out over the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico. Famed waters, these are. Any sailor who has experienced this passage will take a big breath and pause before telling you their personal horror story.

By the time we reached the Dominican Republic the signs of stress were starting to show on the sailors around us. One couple put their boat up for sale. Another threatened divorce. A single-handed sailor put his boat on the hard for a season to "go home and think about it for a while". Many got sucked into major boat repairs or marina life and stayed longer, then longer, always finding a reason not to leave. That last one tempted us too. The Dominican Republic is affordable to cruisers, the fresh food is plentiful and the people are friendly. But in our case the insurance company won't have it - they want us South of Latitude 12.40 (the hurricane belt) by July 1st. So we had to keep moving.

BBQ at Los Pinos, on the mountaintop Ruta de Lechon (pork route)

In the end the Mona Passage was every bit as awful as we'd heard to expect: the pokiest middle finger at the end of a very long thorny path. We were advised not to try to play the currents as their timing was simply unpredictable. We studied the wind and wave patterns very carefully, integrated advice from the weather and local sailor gurus, and still got our asses handed to us by wind, waves, and most of all the current which slowed us from our usual cruising speed of 6.5knots to 3.5knots, extending our time in the wave beating zone by hours. Fortunately Minerva is a sturdy girl and the only casualty she suffered was some trimwork that had to be reattached after arrival. We received only minor bruises that healed quickly.

Shortly before arriving in Puerto Rico in the middle of the night, the wind and waves finally released us and we motored into the anchorage on a glassy sea, a surreal experience. The smell coming off the island of Puerto Rico from the earlier rainstorm was grass and dirt, agriculture and wet sidewalks. In short, it smelled just like a baseball field. The sweat flop had barely dried on our skin when we set the hook in the protected anchorage at Puerto Real and passed out flat, dreaming of childhood days playing at parks.

Ah! That new outboard smile!

Shortly after sunrise our first morning in Puerto Rico the music started. And didn't end until after we'd gone to bed each night. Everywhere in Puerto Rico there is music; all the time from every jetski, every car, every boat. Happy bouncy music and it's all very LOUD. We ordered a new outboard from the local chandlery and settled in to wait for its arrival while the Spring Break insanity unfolded around us in Boqueron, a popular public beach and party town.

These little pouches of deliciousness are called Gasolina and they are made in Puerto Rico. We coined them "adult Capri Suns", they are booze in a squeeze pouch - the perfect way to end a sweltering day. Very little sugar, small enough to keep a few in our tiny freezer, they store in the bilge with no fuss. Lance is addicted to these things.

Continuing East along Puerto Rico's coast meant doing so at night to avoid fighting the tradewinds, and so that was our pattern. Go to bed early, anchor up in the dark, motor in the dark, arrive in the morning light and set the hook, do it again.

Puerto Rico has plentiful US post offices. Huzzah! Finally we were in a position to catch mail from home including a great big bag of flags. These are the flags we are likely to need between now and Christmas, the rest are stowed away for use in 2024.

Then we reached Salinas and received an unexpected miracle, West Winds at 10am and flat seas! We hoisted the spinnaker and reveled in the free ride as far as it would take us, landing in Culebra and setting the hook alongside our buddy boat at midnight. A few days later we made the short hop to the USVI on calm seas in full daylight. And that's the end of the thorny path. We made it. Boat, relationship, and bodies intact. Whew.

Spinnaker sailing! Yeah baby!

 It was an experience, and now we are sailors who will say "we did it once, won't do it again". The dog will just have to finally give in and pee on the boat. She has a pee pad and she knows what we want, she's just stubborn.

The turquoise waters of the USVI remind us of the Bahamas. There are a couple of turtles that pop up for air, we'll go snorkeling after them tomorrow. But first, a cocktail and a toast buh-bye to the thorny path.

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.