Well… the time is coming for WildChild to start making serious progress South. Today we are going to leave Georgetown and head south again.
I have been kind of dreading this next jump to be honest… I am very unsure of myself. The Bahamas is a very safe and very civilized place… so there are no worries here about pirates or corruption of local officials or theft… but that will not remain true for us as we get further south.
WildChild is a tough girl with a tough girl crew… we can handle the sailing parts… but we cannot handle the bad people. Two girls alone on a yacht in maybe unsafe places… we do not want to be unsafe… we do not want bad men to try and board our yacht and cause us problems…
So where should we go?
What is the RIGHT thing for us to do?
We still do not have any reliable information about how safe is the Dominican Republic? So it is an unknown gamble for us. To skip the gamble we would have to make the big 5 day jump out into the Ocean which is a gamble all on its own.
I do not know if this comes as a surprise to you… but the Ocean can be a very nasty place… Sailing can become very un-fun… very quickly… the odds of having a nice sail for a 5 day passage are slim… the odds of getting some bad winds in there are high… With only 2 crew on the boat we will be exhausted… We do not want to make a 5 day jump…
Sooo…. what is the other option…?
Well… that would be to make 2 stops in the Dominican Republic. There is a great protected cruisers anchorage in the DR called Lupperon… with iffy reviews on noonsite (Cruisers forum website). We can’t get any straight answers about the fees they are going to charge if we stop there… because it seems to be a sliding scale for the fees based upon how much the local officials think they can squeeze out of you. There are reports of thefts in the anchorage… and general consensus seems to be that 2 girls alone should not go exploring anyplace on land. Very unsafe.
So I really have to make a decision soon…. I cannot put off this decision much longer… I HAVE TO DECIDE VERY SOON….
There are 2 islands now south of us where we can check out of the Bahamas… Mayaguana Island and Great Inaugua Island… each possible path we are about to take has a different island we have to depart from.
With the trade winds being pretty steady now here in the Bahamas spring we are now seeing wind forecasts of wind 15-20 knots from the East everyday. So if we want to sail East out and around the DR we want to check out of the Bahamas as far east as we can… therefore we want to make East progress soon and go to Mayaguana to the South East of us now.
IF we want to risk going to the DR then we want to check out of the Bahamas more south at Great Inaugua Island which puts us an easy 160 mile jump to Lupperon.
So today we just make an easy jump about 30 miles to stage ourselves at Newton Cay… From there get to the bottom of the Exuma chain in South Point Cay tomorrow.
Then…. we must decide…
Plan A/ risk the 5 day jump?
Plan B/ risk the Dominican Republic?
To be honest… we are dreading the idea of a 5 day jump… so right now we are leaning towards going to Lupperon. Break this down into a bunch of 30 hour jumps to get to Puerto Rico.
This will either turn out totally fine….
OR…
Be the biggest mistake of my life…
And the weight of this decision is really beginning to wear on me. The pressure is on…
To my YouTube subscribers… Internet access is about to become a very difficult and sporadic thing for us… so the video releases are going to slow down… also the blog posts will become less frequent. We will be busy sailing everyday.
But… we will do our best to keep you guys updated as much as we can…
Let’s hope this goes well…. Eeek…!
Captain Lexi…
… the almost Brave and the very nervous again…