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Jan. 26 -Feb 8, 2008 The Dominican Republic |
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After a beautiful overnight sail from Turks and Caicos, we arrived early in the morning at the Ocean World Marina near Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. It's a great marina with a fine restaurant, a casino with a Las Vegas show and a marine park, similar to Sea World but smaller. Our friends on Snark anchored in Luperon, a town just about 8 miles west of where we docked. Luperon is the only anchorage available for extended stays on the north side of the island for cruisers in DR. We had heard mixed reports about it, so along with Sea Otter (Paul and Mary), we deiced to stay in the marina. On Monday, January 28th, the four of us decided to rent a taxi with a guide to visit Puerta Plata, the main town nearby. Compared to the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic is a beautiful country with mountainous terrain covered with trees. As our taxi sped to town, we were initially happy to be driving on the "right" side of the road after being stressed in Provo on the "wrong" side, but we were quickly disappointed. In the DR, it appears traffic lanes seem to be quite optional as we were passed by cars left and right on the two lane road while cars in the other direction did the same. We were happy to finally be in the old town where the extremely narrow streets forced a certain amount of lane discipline. The day started with a visit to a jewelry store and a hand-rolling cigar demonstration. DR is well known for its cigars, but not as well known for its amber jewelry. The women were quit intrigued by the beautiful deep amber jewelry and Terri and Mary left with several beautiful pieces. I picked up a few fresh cigars for later and we went for lunch down the street. When we sat down at the restaurant, the proprietor came around to show off the "blue plate special" of the day - a huge, live lobster which was not really happy to be invited to the lunch. The women ended up having lobsters for lunch, which took longer than we expected, so everyone had a couple of bottles of beer each. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your state of mind), the local Presidente beer comes in 22 ounce bottles, so by the time lunch arrived, we were all happy we weren't driving. The next stop was what I was waiting for - the Brugal rum bottling factory. Brugal is one of the top producers in the world, but it only exports about 17% of its production every year. That leaves about 9 bottles for every person (man, woman and child) in the DR per year. I believe that this is why Dominicans are so friendly all the time - its their job to make sure not too many bottles of Brugal rum leave the country. After the tour, we filled up with as much cheap, but high quality rum that we could fit in the boat. Paul and I were able to buy a 12 year old rum called Siglo de Oro that we had never seen before in the US, a great sipping rum that tasted more like a great brandy. After several tastings combined with the couple of monster Presidentes at lunch, it was time to get back to the marina and take a siesta. The next day we decided to brave the traffic and rent a car to drive over to Luperon to visit Snark and take look at the anchorage. Luperon was pretty much as expected. The town was fairly shabby and dirty, very crowded and noisy from the huge, blaring speakers from many of the local stores. The anchorage was better than we had expected. Although the water was very murky, it was pretty calm and we could see about 40 boats from where we stood. Dan from Snark thought that there were about 100 boats in the anchorage, including a few dozen boats that had been anchored there for several years. After lunch at Captain Steve's Place (a cruiser gone good), the six of us packed into the car to drive to La Isabela, the first city established in the New World by Christopher Columbus. Not too much to see there and since all the signs in the museum were in Spanish, we didn't leave with much new information about Columbus. We dropped Dan and Kimber back at Luperon with the agreement that they would come over to the marina the on Sunday for a TexMex dinner before the Superbowl. Since Dan and Kimber didn't have a rental car, they decided that they would use local transportation options - "guaguas". Guaguas are generally small-to-medium microbuses that run on fixed routes, but they don't seem have any visible signs to let you know what the route is. Snark finally showed up in the afternoon after several hours working the system, but at least they arrived. Paul had put together most of the TexMex dinner (enchiladas, chile and rice) while Terri cooked black beans. It had been months since any of us had had good TexMex and there was very little left after dinner. Originally, we were planning to watch the game on Paul and Mary's boat, but it turned out that the marina's cable didn't show Fox Sports. Luckily, the bar down the road had installed several big screens just for the game. Since American football isn't a big game in the DR (baseball, however, is another thing), the bar was packed full of Americans. Except for the monster bottles of Presidente, we could have been on the water in Texas. Although we were having a good time in the DR, we had been keeping an eye on the weather. As usual, the weather was not being cooperative. The cruising guru for this area, Bruce Van Sant, is adamant about sailing at night across this coast because the wind dies down due to the effect of the land. After staying up late most of the week to check the wind, we never did see this famous "night lee". Eventually, Chris Parker gave us a small, short window to cross the coast and on to Puerto Rico through the Mona Passage. On February 8, the two off us left the marina late in the evening for Escondido on the northern side of Samana, about 100 nautical miles from Puerto Plata. Despite the decent weather forecast and our hope of catching the infamous night lee, the wind was howling and the waves were intense. Our plan was to anchor in Escondido for six or seven hours and recover before continuing on toward the Mona Passage. We were happy for the break. Once we anchored, we were approached by the local Navy "officer" - one guy wearing some not very clean slacks and a shirt that could have been white in an earlier lifetime. He was rowed by an old man and a young teenager in a dilapidated pirogue and he slowly and politely boarded each of the four boats in the anchorage to check our papers. We knew from Van Sant's book that it was polite to give him and his rowers a little "tip", and he had suggested a small bottle of rum would be the ticket. I guess that after several hundreds of cruisers he probably had enough rum for a lifetime, so when we offered him the rum, he motioned for cash. A few bucks seemed to make him happy and he was on his way, but not without taking the bottle of rum as well. Escondido had a beautiful anchorage with steep hills going straight into the water, almost a Tahiti-like view. Unfortunately, there were several rolls coming from different directions, making it impossible to find a way to anchor the boat in a calm area. Given how tired we were after the overnight crossing, we fell asleep almost immediately after the officer left. Finally, around midnight we pulled anchor to head across the Mona Passage on the way to Puerto Rico. The passage would take about 30 hours and we were happy to see that the wind had dropped significantly. As we motorsailed to the southwest (pretty much directly into the wind), we were able to see the coast of the Dominican Republic to our right almost all day. Finally around sunset, we saw the last of the DR. Next stop: Puerto Rico.
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 Superbowl in DR. |
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