Well… we have been trying to make our Escape from the Dominican Republic and it is going okay so far… BUT… there have been some snags.
So as you know from the last Blog I had been eyeing a weather window I had seen coming to make the big jump upwind against the thorny path that would open Tuesday October 29th 2019.
As we approached the date conditions still looked perfect (in theory) so I made the decision late Monday night to make the jump. WildChild was going to try and make a run close hauled upwind to the other end of the DR. The wind was supposed to bear off the bow for just a bit of angle to the north and we were going to take it.
As you guys always hear me talk about… you can never trust mom to follow a wind forecast… and you never know what the conditions on the ocean will be until you are actually out there. So as you can imagine I was rather relieved Tuesday when we got out onto the ocean again and conditions were calm. It looks like we might actually succeed at our 3rd attempt to make this nasty jump. If you remember the first 2 times last June failed, first one we broke the boat in 12 foot breaking waves off the coast of Peurto Plata, the 2nd failure was more of a morale decision not to take the beating again in 10 foot waves on the forward port bow (third wave to the face at the helm in the dark filling the cockpit with water just de-motivated me to go on).
BUT… this time conditions looked good….
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Escape from Luperon
I want to go back a little bit here and get into some of the details about trying to leave Luperon, remember some of my previous blog about how crazy the rules here are… ?
So to leave Luperon you need written permission from the Dominican Navy called a Dispatchio.
So us girls went into town one last time Tuesday morning to visit with the Navy and get ourselves a dispatchio to leave. We wanted to try and make our way to the eastern end of the DR to a little protected place called Samana. From there we could check out of the country and it is a good staging point for the jump across the (much feared and dreaded) Mona passage.
This did not go so well…
Your favorite 2 girls walked our way up to the Navy compound at the top of the hill and sat and waited patiently for the Navy to make out and give us our dispatchio. and waited and waited and waited… It seems we arrived at 11:45 and they eat lunch at exactly noon… and although there are 8 of them sitting around outside watching Dominican soap operas on TV and playing on their phones they are all way too busy to actually help us. (this is the Dominican way and you have to get used to it). We wait patiently and eventually after several different soldiers came and went… the Navy intelligence officer Romeo told us an hour and a half later that we cannot have a dispatchio for Samana… !
Yep… it seems we were not allowed to leave. This will make no sense as it is Dominican thinking but… in their world… once a pleasure craft has been there for 3 months we have to drive to the capital to pay for a Dominican cruising permit. So for less than 3 months in Luperon you can have a dispatchio to leave … BUT… after your boat has been in the country more than 3 months you cannot have a dispatchio.
We can only have a Dispatchio to leave the country completely…! YEP super big dangerous pile of stupid… so there was no way I was going to miss my weather window for their bullshit rules and go pay them for a cruising permit… I said fine give me a dispatchio for Peurto Rico then… (Dominican way just tell them whatever they want to hear then do whatever you want… I am beginning to learn their culture) we will just leave the country. They say ok then no problem… when do you want to leave..? we said at around 3pm… they said okay we will bring the dispatchio out to your boat.. you call us on VHF68 and we will come when you are ready to leave.
FINE… you coulda told us this an hour and half ago but fine then.
2:30pm we call them.. ok we are all ready to leave..
They come… and say hey… you cannot leave you have to check out with immigration… I said but we are not leaving the country we are just going to Samana and we will check out with immigration there…. they say no you have to pay here… I say but when I go to Samana I do not want to pay all the bribes and fees to reenter the country… they say no worries you will not have to repay in Samana… Its cultural they just say whatever makes you calm down and be happy… truth has no bearing with them. I was starting to boil with the bullshit.
Our dinghy is on deck and the Navy agrees to ferry us into town to pay the immigration fees. We go to immigration… the guy is actually very nice.. using google translate we explain to him we have to check out but we already paid 7 months of immigration fees when we went to Haiti 4 weeks ago… so we should not have to repay again… he says show me the receipt… we say we showed you 4 weeks ago when we came to get our money back… you told us it would be in the computer no problem… no need to keep the receipts… grrrrr….. I say check the computer… it doesn’t work… of course not… but he relents and does not recharge us the immigration fees again… yay.
Then as we are walking away the Port Authority guy says he wants money… we had a receipt showing we already paid the port fee… and we walk away. By the time we walk down the pier to the awaiting Navy guys with our stamped passports… the port guys are there and telling the Navy we did not pay the port fees… we show the receipt again… we paid them… no no no they say… you have to pay that fee every month you are here… it doesn’t say that anywhere… nobody told us that… the sheet they showed us says vessels over 35 feet pay a port fee of $20usd. We did. No no no… you pay $20 for every month… you were here 4 months you owe us $80usd… the fee sheet you showed us does not say that… you are just making this up… I say but I have a receipt for $20usd already… I paid it already… okay okay you cannot leave until you pay us another 3000 pesos ($60usd)… grrrr…. they take the last of our money… but fine… finally we are allowed to go… they have fleeced us dry so they are happy with that.
The Navy ferries us out to WildChild, its getting late now… we had to leave 2 hours ago… my weather window is going to close before I finish the jump… grrr….
The Navy says we are going to come on your boat and inspect it… what..? they never inspected the last 2 times we left a DR port… what are you inspecting it for… ? no questions we will look… fine then… welcome aboard… They look around and take a bunch of pictures of the inside of our boat and they leave.
We finally have permission to leave…
So much bullshit… holy crap I don’t want to deal with that again…
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Sailing away…
Well we are finally leaving as the sun is beginning to make its way down behind the mountains… we have just enough light to see the marker buoys in the channel to make our way out into open water
I do not care what their stupid rules say… we are going to sail to Samana exactly as planned. The weather window will close Thursday night and massive waves (3-6 meters) are going to roll into the Mona passage from the north Atlantic storms a 1000 miles north. We do not have time to make the run all the way to PR…. it would be unsafe… and we are not going to die for stupid rules.
We get WildChild out into the open Ocean and raise the sails and kill the engine and it is so peaceful… I remember that I used to love sailing…
The waves are around 1 meter and the winds are light at around 7-11 knots but no problem. The winds are still coming from due east (our direction of Travel) so we have to bear off towards the north but that is the plan… by around 4am the winds are supposed to shift NE and we can tac and make a straight shot to Samana.
Well… as per usual mother nature did not get the forecast. The winds did not shift to the north at all… we took them from due east until late Wednesday Afternoon. You can see from the Garmin tracker map that we really did not make a lot of east progress for the first 30 hours… we sailed upwind in light and squirrely/shifty winds. It is hard to point into winds that shift +/- 15 degrees each way … so I could not get WildChild very tight to the wind… we were TWA of about 35-65 degrees off the bow… winds swinging constantly. My planned 1 tac jump didn’t happen and our overall distance was going up much more than planned and our forward speed was much slower than planned… (we averaged about 2-4 knots for the first 24 hours).
You can see though… that although 15 hours late the winds did eventually bear off to ENE just enough to give me my tac angle overnight Wednesday night to start my close hauled run ESE towards the safety and protection of the Samana shoreline.
There is a rule good sailing captains follow that says always always sail at night with reduced sails… reef your main at least once before sunset… bc if things get sporty in the dark.. you will not see it coming… the other person will be asleep… and your life can get suddenly very difficult very fast… the safe thing to do is to always reef sails in at night…
I made a difficult decision to break the rule… Wednesday night… as the winds finally picked up… and the wind angle improved and the wind direction became steady enough to get tight to (TWA 40 deg AWA 28 deg)… I decided to run in the dark with full sails. I knew the weather window would close sometime Thursday and there were big nasty waves coming south towards us soon. We needed this speed and distance to make up for the slow off course sailing we had done the last 36 hours.
The decision worked out perfectly… you can see from the map our speed and direction improved Wednesday night and Thursday.
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What do we do while sailing…
We had been trapped in the safety of Luperon hurricane hole for 4 months of not sailing, so it was good to actually be out in the ocean again. There are hardships though that maybe we had kind of forgotten about.
You get tired. WildChild is a light weight sort of flat’ish bottom boat that is very narrow for cutting thru the waves but she tends to be a bit dancy on the waves. You tend to feel every little movement of the boat on the water, so it is un-fun to be down below while sailing. This means that us girls just spent the last 3 days in the cockpit. There is not much to do in the cockpit. I tend to get bored.. Elena tends to get tired and sleepy.
I was wondering how our stomachs would react to the constant motion of the ocean again. Did we lose our sea legs? Although the ocean was pretty calm that first night, only 1 meter waves, I vomited after about 3 hours, but other wise felt fine. Just a sudden urge to upchuck out of nowhere, give my dinner to Neptune, but I felt fine. That was the only discomfort I had the entire time. The rest of the trip I was completely fine.
Elena said her tummy did not feel good for the first 30 hours, she did not vomit (she never does) but she didn’t feel good. Consequently she began starving herself and dehydrating. I kind of had to push her to keep sipping a little water every 20 minutes.
We do not really feel like going down below to cook while on passage either so we tend to just keep a lot of snack foods handy. When I was in Florida last year my friend Vicki gave me a jar of chocolate flavored peanut butter that we opened for this passage. I learned when I used to do expedition kayaking that one of the best high energy snacks you can have is good old BP & J… add some Ritz crackers because they sit well in a rolly tummy and viola… simple fast and easy to keep down.
If you have seen our YouTube videos we also know we keep heaps of junk food on board. We ate a lot of lays potato chips and candy too. Candy always helps when your mood gets unhappy. Elena had bought a good supply of fresh fruits too so eventually she started to eat apples and plums and peaches she had in the galley.
When we are sailing I tend to take most of the time at the helm. Elena takes the midnight to 4 am shift that I cannot do and relieves me when I ask her to, but she tends to sleep all the time she is not on shift. She is normally a very shy quiet person and on passage she is not very good company.
I GET SO BORED sailing for days and days. I have my Garmin inreach and I can text friends for information and company. I listen to BBC Podcasts a lot. If the waves are calm and the cockpit dry I can bring up my laptop and watch a movie. I recently bought drum sticks so I can listen to music and play the drums on the cushions. What else is there to do at the helm. ITS BORING.
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Arrival…
Well… after forever on the Ocean again I started to remember why I stopped enjoying sailing.
Yesterday as the ocean swell began growing and the weather window was just beginning to close we made our way around the corner into the protection of this bay. My overwatch people told me that the nasty waves were due to start building between 4-6pm yesterday I had better get to safety before they came. We dropped the hook around 4pm a few miles before Samana in a little cove protected by a small outcropping hill.
WildChild is safely at anchor…. nobody has come out to hassle us for bribes or money yet… maybe the Navy doesn’t know we are here..? This is safe but it is a very rolly anchorage for the next few days.
We are waiting for a weather window to make the Mona passage crossing next. Not sure when… maybe Monday and Tuesday?
We might be encountering a snag here too though… it seems America is kind of crazy about entry rules and there seems to be many crazy different ideas about those rules. Elena is a German citizen (a member of a visa waiver European country) with a valid ESTA (stupid american ok we do not think you are a terrorist document) which is supposed to allow her entry into America (and PR)… but we have read some reviews from other cruisers who said the American officials in the PR gave them a hard time about entry.
Elena might not be allowed into PR…
Hmmm… that will be bad for us… as it is another 280 miles upwind to reach British Tortola. We cannot do that in 1 jump safely.
Right now we are officially not in the DR anymore… and maybe cannot get into PR.
2 girls without a country huh…
………. not sure when I will get internet again to write the next blog..
but we got lots of adventure in front of us… good and bad…
Cheers Sailor fans…
Captain Lexi…
…….. the stressed and worried again…