Antigua to USA

Thursday 31 May: Puerto Rico to Dominican Republican
Early hours and we are still looking at Puerto Rico, both on the horizon to our port, and on the plotter! But we passed 2/3 of it now. Maybe we will actually get passed it one day!
After we pass San Juan, a boat shows up on the AIS. Glen keeps an eye on it but the radar position doesn’t plot over its AIS position. Very odd. Then we realise by the lights that it’s a tug boat, towing. As it passes us we see a very dim hulk almost 1/2nm behind the tug. That explains the radar vs AIS plot. During Oana’s shift, same situation again, another tug towing a large object. Just what are they towing?
Glen purposefully went south of the rhum line to Turks & Caicos to go through a zone of accelerated wind just north of Puerto Rico. We are nicely in this wind all night, 15-20kts, dead astern. Perfect. A fast and relatively stable sail.
We have a wonderful sunrise at 5:30am. Well, we didn’t see the sun but the light in the multiple clouds and rain cells was picture perfect. To add to the nature events, there is a pod of 10-15 dolphins playing on the bow for about 30 mins. We had really missed dolphins. Not many sightings in the Antillies. We also have a bird resting in the gap between tent and bimini. Looks like a pigeon, only much prettier.
Glen manages to connect on time for Chris Parker’s weather forecast on SSB and he finds the info useful not necessarily for the forecast, which we can interpret ourselves on GRIB files, but for the overall chat and potential hazards that may start forming in other areas.
At 7am we get a call from yet another tug boat coming up behind us. A very chatty American captain. He informs how he will pass us. Glen asks what all these tugs are towing. They are 3-deck roll-on-roll-off barges. There are 5 of them, delivering goods to Puerto Rico from Jacksonville, Florida, and taking rum on the way back to US. We wonder why they deliver this way rather than RORO ferries. Glen also discusses routing with the captain and gets some useful information. We are now out of range of any of our pilot books so we are feeling a little vulnerable!
By 2 pm we are in line with Cabo Engano, the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, but quite a few miles offshore so we can’t make out it’s silhouette on the horizon, but a line of puffy clouds shows where it is.
The wind is very consistent between 13-17kts and we manage to make an average speed of 7-8kts. This raises our overall average for this leg at 6.7kts.
For the last few hours we have been sailing in parallel with another sailing yacht which our AIS picked up. A 35m boat, Columbia, approx 8nm from us, but we can’t see it on the horizon. Glen picked it up once through the monocular, a schooner, but they seem to be motoring, we couldn’t see the sails. Pitty for such a big boat to be motoring in this wind…
We must have been very active and busy over the last few months, as Glen hasn’t given any thought to his clarinet. And guess what, he is thinking of playing his clarinet now. He must be bored! Glen, the one who never ever gets bored 🙂
And also to chase the boredom away, we attempted fishing. Attempt was all we did all afternoon, as we only caught 2 lumps of sargasso weed. At sunset, when we were just about to reel the fishing line in, we hear the long expected sound of it spinning out fast: we caught a fish! And by the tension in the line, it must be a big one. Finally the catch-of-day is reeled in. Glen struggles a bit to lift it from the water, but few minutes later a sizable Mahi-Mahi is peacefully forever asleep on the aft deck. Great catch! That decides our lunch menu for tomorrow …. and probably the next day too!
In the process of bringing the fish onboard, we had to reduce the boat speed, so we furled the genoa away and reefed the main. After the excitement with the fish was over, the decks cleaned and the Mahi-Mahi in the fridge, we take the main fully out and have a trial with genoa on the port side (same as main) and heading 20deg further starboard at 330M. Surprisingly, it does manage to fill on this very broad reach and our speed is a steady 7-8kts. We are now heading direct to Turks & Caiocs.
But recalculating our ETA indicates we will very likely arrive after sunset. Is it really worth struggling to anchor in the dark, sleep, then be off again in the morning? We decide it’s not worth changing course for, so 3 hours later we steer back onto 310M and put the genoa back to starboard on the pole.
And the evening finishes like this sailing downwind at 8kts in full moon and very little rocking. Just lovely 🙂 By midnight we are level with Cabo Cabron, 1/4 of the way along the Dominican-Haiti island.