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Subject: [world-cruising] Our Weekend Cruise
From: Rick H Kennerly (rick@XXX.XXX)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2003 - 16:57:31 EDT
Just got in from a long weekend charging Xapic, our Westsail 32, around our
little corner of the Caribbean. enjoy.
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All week we'd planned that our weekend destination would be Culebre island,
about 26 miles directly to windward. Normally, anytime after Christmas or
before June, that's a damn hard slog across Vieques Sound from where we are
on the eastern shores of Puerto Rico, particularly with stronger than
normal trade winds blowing like stink this year. Still, as late as Thursday
night we figured we could make it because the trades had slacked some over
the last week and a lighter summer wind pattern seemed to be spreading
across the Caribbean. So Friday morning at the buttcrack of dawn we charged
out of Ensenda Honda and rounded the corner N - NE directly into a 4-hour
downpour in dead still air. My bad.
That's the trouble with winters in the Caribbean. We get so use to perfect,
monotonous, unremarkable weather that we sometimes forget to check with NOAA
before we take off. Turns out that the tail end of a cold front from the
states was dragging down through the islands and wasn't expected to clear
out until late afternoon. Drenched but undeterred, we decided to duck in
behind the reefs and anchor in the lee of Isla Pineros, just 2 hours away.
There is a narrow channel between Isla Pineros and another islet to the SW
with a tiny little cull-de-sac carved into a side of the channel with a
patch of sand at 12 ft, just big enough for one boat swinging or three boats
with fore and aft anchors, all in the wind shadow of a rock maybe 80 ft
tall. While usually a crowded stop for the Marina Del Rey powerboat
crowd, we had the place to ourselves (guess they checked the weather).
Whatever it was that passed through kept storming until late afternoon. No
thunder, no lightning, just a straight up and downpour. So we whiled away
the hours below, napping to the rhythm of Caribbean drumming rain on deck.
Isn't it funny how you don't want to get in the water when it's raining?
Snorkeling is not spectacular here anyway. Isla Pineros is so popular that
it was fished out years ago and lobsters are nonexistent. But the coral's
pretty and the reef fish are pretty cool. The fish here, mostly angel fish
and a kind of yellow wrass, are used to being hand-fed, so they have no fear
of humans and swarm about your mask demanding a handout by pecking at your
hair and faceplate until you hand over the goods or swat them away.
For hunter-gather activity or stellar underwater sightseeing we still prefer
the nearly uninhabited and seldom visited south coast of Vieques, but the
winds were wrong for that destination on this trip. The last time we were
over at Vieques we swam with eagle rays the size of riding lawnmowers and
saw several sea turtles. We even scored three good sized lobsters. There's
also a bioluminescent bay where, on a dark night, you can swim in your own
circle of light
http://www.biobay.com/ .
Anyway, after the rains stopped & the decks dried we fired up the barbie and
grilled a couple of choice New York Strips and watched as a gray sun slid
behind the slopes of El Yunque rain forest and finally lent the clouds a
gold rimmed, crimson cast just before setting--"red sky at night, sailor's
delight". We dined in the cockpit, bathed in the gently swaying pool of
gold cast by our trawler lamp and wreathed in exotic oriental incense from a
mosquito coil on the cockpit sole. As we finished off a bottle of wine, we
rocked and talked and listened to the chain rumble across the coral as the
tide turned, and then we headed for bed.
Saturday dawned sunny and windless. On the other side of the reefs, Vieques
Sound was a never ending row of small greasy swells. Oops, my sorta bad #2.
Culebre is not only dead up wind but in the early morning also dead up sun
from Isla Pineros, and once away from the island we couldn't see through the
glare to figure out how to thread Xapic through the unmarked reefs and rocks
that we'd have to cross to get out into the open waters of Vieques Sound.
Worse, if we waited for good sun nearer noon, we'd find ourselves out after
dark as we approached Culebre in an area described by the cruising guides as
"reef strewn with numerous coral heads". No problem, Mon. We turned north
and headed between the buoys marking the reef passage behind Cayo Largo and
let our Perkins diesel push us along toward Palominos Island.
Palominos is owned by the Westin Rio Mar hotel and sports a high rise condo.
Residents ferry from Palominos to work and shopping in Fajardo and back
again each day. Rio Mar hotel guests on the main island pay extra on their
$300 a night rooms to ferry over for secluded sunbathing, beach combing and
jungle exploration. For some reason the management likes cruisers and
encourages them to hang around, probably to give the place a more exotic
look in tourist pictures. That doesn't mean that cruisers get free run of
the facilities, what you use you have to pay for--handsomely, but they do
allow free access to the beaches far away from the facilities for cruiser
picnics and get togethers. What's kind of neat about Palominos is that as
you approach from the SW you're in fairly deep water, 60 feet or so, and
then suddenly you run up onto a huge shelf of white, hard sand that shoals
gradually from about 20 feet to 6 feet over several hundred yards, not only
plenty of room and good holding for dozens of boats, but protected from the
NE trades and swells as well. Palominos is "the" place to find a lot of
long-term, hard-core cruisers in Puerto Rico, and we anchored among 20
cruising boats and dozens of weekenders.
At Palominos we met up with 3-time circumnavigators Roger and Molly aboard
their Westsail 32 Sundowner, headed back to our marina in Ensenada Honda,
and Earl and Jean aboard their Westsail 32 Tropical Treat, headed nowhere.
As far a Jean was concerned, Tropical Treat was in Coffee Ground Sound
indefinitely and run hard aground on Chicken Bone Reef. In other words,
they had no intentions of leaving before an approaching storm ran them off.
Roger & Molly, on the other hand, who had been accustomed to spending the
Caribbean hurricane season out of harm's way in Columbia or Venezuela were
alarmed by the trouble cruisers were having down there now, are already
planning to summer over in the hot, muddy, windless Chesapeake. They just
don't feel safe down south anymore.
But what was really on Roger's mind was the huge Mahi-Mahi he'd bought from
the fish boat that serves the condo's restaurant. We dinghied back over to
Xapic and Earl & Jean zipped back over to TT to whip up some quick dishes
and grab some drinks, then we all met on the beach about an hour later.
Earl & I scavenged firewood while Roger prepared the catch butterfly
filet-style, greasing the skin with Crisco, and setting up his portable
grill over the fire pit. Once the remnants of Roger's Boy Scout match had
burned off and the fire was going strong, we placed Roger's trophy on the
grill skin down and waited, testing every beer or two with a fork for
flakiness. Woody, fishy smoke swirled around us and kept the no-see'ums at
a respectable distance until we finished. Later we were joined by Debi &
John from Daybreak, a Roberts 48 they'd built & finished out themselves. We
drank, we told stories, we laughed, we gorged ourselves and, toward dark, we
marveled as sea salts in the driftwood turn the fire every hue of the
rainbow...then we motored like hell for the boats, pursued by billions of
biting, blood sucking insects.
This morning we upped anchor around 10, dodged outside the reefs, and headed
home. Winds were light from the E-NE at maybe 5 knots, a nice reach for
southbound boats. Gayle and I raised the main and then decided to make
sausage. Aboard Xapic, making sausage means hoisting the sausage sail, our
cruising spinnaker sheathed in a sock that looks like a really long
bratwurst when hoisted. The sail is quite impressive and very strong when
sheeted in. In fact (my bad # 3) the sail is so strong that when I raised
the sock prematurely, it lifted Gayle off of the deck until she decided to
let go of the sheet she was trying to untangle or go overboard. Under the
influence of her blue, green and white spinnaker cloud, Xapic picked up her
skirts, kicked up her heels and accelerated smartly. I set the windvane,
and we rolled on back home.
Have a good work week.
Rick NH2F
Westsail 32 Xapic
Cabo San Juan, Puerto Rico
www.mouseherder.com/xapic/sleep.html
www.westsail.org
Sail like a Kiwi
Anchor like a Canadian
Live like a Texan
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