Do You Smell Oil?

On our third day of early morning coasting along Puerto Rico's south coast, we were heading for Cayo Aurora, better known by the locals as Gilligan's Island. Rumor has it that the locals gave it that name because it looks like the island in the TV show and one of the local fishermen looked like Bob Denver. Silly but true?

Anyway, when I told the mechanic I was at Cayo Aurora he responded "where???". So I tried "Gilligan's Island", and he replied"Oh, yeah... you'll have no problem getting to Ponce then". So, regardless of what the chart says, it is called Gilligan's Island. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We were within about a mile or so out of Cayo Aur... er, I mean, Gilligan's Island when I started smelling something I did not want to smell, in fact I tried to convince myself that nah, it can't be THAT. (Can you say "denial" boys and girls?). Gear oil. Synthetic gear oil has a smell that is hard to mistake. It stinks. So, I started wandering around the boat... first forward to see if the smell was coming from somewhere in front of us. Nope. So it's us. Maybe I didn't clean up the motor oil I spilled when topping off the engine... but it doesn't smell like engine oil. It smells like gear lube. Jen noticed my preoccupation as well as the smell and asked if we were burning oil. No, I said, not burning, but something's not right. We throttled down that engine a little, made the anchorage off Gilligan's Island and I started checking things out. The sump under the engine had a small pool of greenish smelly synthetic gear oil. Our upper sail drive gearbox shaft seal was shot.

While Jen and Quinn joined Kathy and John (our friends on Oceana) exploring Gilligan's Island, I poked around the engine a little to confirm the problem, called a mechanic I knew in Ft Lauderdale to get his opinion, and then began the chore of finding a mechanic in Puerto Rico. My first call struck gold. I called the Ponce Yacht and Fishing Club and asked them for a recommendation. I received two. The first recommendation was Luis Santos, and I had no need to call the second. After about 15 minutes on the phone I was convinced I'd found a good mechanic. He had a good understanding of Yanmar sail drives as he asked me all the right questions to confirm that I had diagnosed the problem correctly, he was happy to discuss the problem with me, and spoke very good English, which was a big help to me since my Spanish is awful.

So, with a slip reserved in Ponce Yacht Club for the repair and a mechanic lined up for the following week, we motored on over to Ponce to get the shaft seal repaired.

It has been said that the correct definition of Cruising is: "fixing you boat in exotic locations". So it is at times.

Coasting at Dawn

We had a great weather forecast for transiting the south coast of Puerto Rico. The trades were light, 15 knots or so from the east. In addition, we had at our disposal the wisdom of Bruce Van Sant in the form of his "Gentleman's Guide to Passages South". Distilled from decades of experience in these waters, Bruce's advice for transiting the Thorny Path can be very helpful.

As with all advice, written or otherwise, a mariner is best served by weighing it against their own circumstances and heeding it only with caution. In our case, Bruce's advice proved very helpful for the most part. As for transiting the south coast of Puerto Rico, Bruce's advice was spot-on.

The south coast of Puerto Rico is littered with fine anchorages protected by cays and barrier reefs. With time on your hands, the most comfortable way to work eastwards into the Trades is to leave just before dawn and motor for 3 or 4 hours along the coast, no more than a mile or two offshore, being cautious of the reefs. Before the winds pipe up, say by 9AM, tuck in to an anchorage.

The Trades blow continuously, regardless of day or night, but around big islands you get interference from the hot air rising from the islands. In the few hours before and after dawn you can take advantage of the still air and seas provided by this "night lee". If you are interested in how you can parlay this into a comfortable passage straight into the Trades, read his book. If nothing else, the book is an interesting insight into the cruising lifestyle and if you don't take his considerable egotism seriously, quite amusing.

The "Dawn Coasting" plan worked very well for us. We would get up, raise anchor and be on our way as the first glimmer of dawn warmed the eastern sky.

By 9AM we usually had the anchor back down. The rest of the day would be spent exploring the anchorage and nearby town (if there was one.) At least it worked until I was just a little too pleased with myself and how well things were going. But then, a little adversity is good for the spirit, right?

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.

Puerto Rico - Arriving on the West Coast

I'm falling behind in my blogs so in the next few postings I'm going to try to cover a lot of ground, so to speak.

On arriving in Puerto Rico, I found I liked it immediately. The rich green rolling hills climbing towards the volcanic peaks in the eastern half of the island was a great contrast to the flat landscape of Florida, The Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos. The people were also very welcoming, as I worked out how to clear in.

Being a US Territory, clearing in to Puerto Rico for a US Citizen is pretty straight forward. However, if you don't participate in the US Customs Local Boater system, it's less convenient than most Carribbean ports of call. US Customs is located downtown in Mayaguez, about 15 miles north of Puerto Real. We chose not to stop in Mayaquez to clear in because it is a commercial port and not very comfortable for small vessels like Mirasol. Instead, the procedure is to call an 800 number on arrival and provide your information over the phone. I tried to do this with my satellite phone, but the phone system wouldn't accept an international call into the 800 number.

A local saw me trying to call customs and offered his cell phone for my use. He introduced himself as Fernando from Salinas and ran a small convenience shop in the marina complex. He proved to be an excellent source of local info, anchorage recommendations for the western and southern coasts of Puerto Rico, and best of all, $0.93 ice cold beers. I asked him where I could find a good chart for the anchorages he mentioned, and he dug out an old marked-up chart and gave it to me.

Anyway, back to clearing in. Customs took down our passport and vessel information over the phone and then told us we had 24 hours to present ourselves at the Customs office in Mayaguez to complete the process. The president of the marina, Jose, arranged for a car to take us the 15 miles up the coast to the Customs office. We were cleared in without any hassle and also signed up for the Local Boater program to avoid having to present ourselves in person in certain US ports in the future.

On the way back to Puerto Real, the driver stopped at a grocery store and we loaded up on groceries, and a little local rum and beer.

Speaking of the local rum and beer... Don Q is the local rum, and I find it the best silver rum I've tasted, certainly better than Bacardi Silver. The local beer favorite is Medalla, pronounced Mediiya, and it also quickly became a favorite on board. It is served in 10 oz ice cold cans, often so cold ice is frozen to the side of the can. When I first arrived in the Caribbean last year I found that 10oz cans and bottles are commonplace, and as we approached the summer months the reason for this is evident. It can be HOT here, especially if you're sheltered from the trade winds. You will want your beer ICE cold. The smaller 10oz cans are easy to finish off before that last bit gets warm. At $1 a beer, I can live with the smaller can. As I will be reminded later in our voyage, the smaller can doesn't come with a corresponding smaller price tag as you move south down-island. But that's for another blog.

I suppose I didn't cover much ground in this post. I'll do better in the next, or I'll never catch up! (We’re in the BVI as I write this).