My Discovery of Mofongo

We stayed about a week and a half on the west coast of Puerto Rico. The first three nights were spent in the Marina Pescadaria, Puerto Real, adjusting to the local ambiance and resting from the passage from Turks and Caicos. We felt very welcome and Quinn found someone to play with almost every night.

One evening we ate a local family-run restaurant and had a great meal. I ordered Mofongo, mostly because it was fun to say "Mofongo, por favor" after I'd had a few Medallas. Mofongo is a dense pile of mashed plantains and garlic, stuffed with your choice of seafood, chicken, pork or "meat"(beef). It is usually served smothered in a delicious sauce with rice and beans on the side. I had a shrimp mofongo that night and it was delicious. It turns out that Mofongo is a dish found on most menus in Puerto Rico, and each one is a little different. I had fun sampling Mofongo as we worked our way along the Puerto Rican coastline. It was never a disappointment.

We discovered there would be a big fish festival in town in a few days, which sounded too good to miss, but we didn't want to stay in the marina a full week. We arranged dockage at the marina for the festival and then moved south along the coast to Boquerone. Boqerone is a town that caters to the weekend party crowd, and was pretty quiet the two weekday nights we anchored there. The anchorage is quite large and about a third of the boats seemed to be anchored there on a permanent basis. A few, I'm certain, had marine growth securing them them firmly to the ground, making their anchor superfluous.

After two nights in Boquerone we returned to Puerto Real for the fish festival. It was a lot of fun. Street vendors, music, dancers, etc. I bought Quinn a couple of boxes of party snaps - the little harmless fire crackers that make a snap when you throw them on the ground - which he loved. He was delighted when he could share them with a little girl he met at the marina.
Kathy and John on Oceana caught up with us while we were in Puerto Real for the Fish Festival. Their short visit to the Dominican Republic was a great success, and they convinced us to visit the DR on our way back north in 2012.

We enjoyed the last day of the Fish Festival with Kathy and John, and went to dinner with them that evening. This time I ordered a freshly caught snapper in tomato garlic sauce. Yum. They know how to cook in Puerto Real.

The next day we left Puerto Real at dawn and returned to Boqueron, this time accompanied by Oceana. We spent a night in Boquerone, and then moved a little south to El Combate. The weather was blustery and rainy so we decided to relax on board Mirasol for the remainder of the day instead of heading ashore.

Again at dawn we departed El Combate and headed south to the south western cape of Puerto Rico, Cabo Rojo. There we found a large inviting anchorage... littered with fish trap floats. We spent about a half hour picking around the small bay and neither we nor Oceana were able to find somewhere to drop anchor without being surrounded by the fish traps. Our plans being to leave before dawn, we didn't want to be picking our way through fish traps in the dark. Instead, we elected to return to El Combate for the night.

El Combate was a busy place with lots of families hanging out on the beach. We had lunch on the beach (I had chicken Mofongo - delicious). Quinn had fun playing on the beach for a little while after lunch, and then we headed back to our boats. At dawn we planned to round Cabo Rojo and start our exploration of Puerto Rico's southern shore.