"Hey, You're Going the Wrong Way!"

Isla Saona, off the southeast corner of the DR. A beautiful national park.

Geography can be hard. The largest land masses, the seven continents of North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia and Antarctica……I had all of those solidly nailed down by the 6th grade thanks to our American public education system. 

I gave in to the teaching that Europe and Asia are considered two continents when in fact, they look pretty darn much like one huge land mass to me. Hmph. Go figure. And who got to decide that Australia was a continent but Greenland was too small to make the cut? Was there a vote? If so, Greenland and some other island nations needed better representation, but I digress. 

Puerto Bahía Marina, Samaná Peninsula, DR

Frankly, until only a few years ago, I was quite content to live my life without giving the smaller chunks of land sticking up out of the oceans any thought whatsoever. All of those thousands of smaller lands, the islands— their very existence occupied an embarrassingly small amount of gray matter in my head. 

Far from our usual marina experience, this is the most
elegant marina we have ever seen.  Inexpensive, too.

I confess this now only to put the readership at ease.  If for example, you have ever been one to surreptitiously dig out an atlas (or to Google) to see where we were while in Trinidad, Grenada, Bonaire, Curacao and now the Dominican Republic, as far as I am concerned, that  is no cause for shame. 

The town of Samaná, on the northeast side of the DR. Home of the Bridge to Nowhere.

Up until a month ago, we had no intention of being in the Dominican Republic right now. Why? Because it’s way north of Bonaire. And when we were in Bonaire, we were really pretty close to South America. Our plans (written in sand, as my husband is wont to say) were to sail to Colombia after the winds settled a bit, later on in April/May.  

Riding a 4 passenger motorized bike

From Colombia, we were to go on to the San Blas Islands (off the eastern Panamanian coast), then to Panama proper and perhaps further north in Central America for the hurricane season where we would have left the boat for a visit back to the U.S.

Our driver, a real ham. Made ambulance
siren sounds much of the way to the
Bridge to Nowhere.

I don’t know whether anybody else has had this thought, but one of our FB friends commented the other day, “Hey, you’re going the wrong way!” Now that guy knows his geography. Indeed, we have moved away from South America and toward the U.S.

Bridge to Nowhere--a resort project that
was abandoned.

For a variety of reasons, we decided that we were not inclined to sail on to Colombia and Central America at this time. Many of our sailing friends have already sailed there and onward. We love seeing FB reports of where they are and what they are doing. We would certainly have enjoyed sailing with them there, but that didn’t happen at the right time.  About a month ago, we looked around and realized that nobody had a gun to our heads saying “You MUST sail on to Colombia from Bonaire” and so we just decided not to.

At the far end of the Bridge to Nowhere

Call us whimsical; call us changeable, tumbleweeds blowin’ in the wind, or simply sailboat vagabonds, but we are heading back to the East Coast of the U.S. for the hurricane season. As you may recall from previous posts, our marine insurance policy requires that we remove our boat from the hurricane zone between June 1 and November 1. 

Paintings sold at the base of bridge

If Northern Star were to remain in the heart of the hurricane zone and was then damaged in a hurricane, she would not be insured. So, our options from Bonaire were: 1) go on to the coast of Central America, 2) return to Trinidad {below 10 degrees latitude N} or 3) move the boat above the Florida/Georgia border. We chose #3. (You and I know that hurricanes hit the U.S. coast north of the Florida/Georgia border as well, but the boat insurers came up with this arbitrary line on the map, so….there you have it. Somebody voted on the geography again).

My first piña colada served
in a pineapple

We still have ~2000 kilometers, or 1079 nautical miles, or 1242 statute miles to get from our current location in Samaná, DR to the Florida/Georgia border. We will bypass about 700 islands (no exaggeration) before then. We will go through the Turks and Caicos, the Exumas and the Ragged Islands and finally the Abacos. We’ll stop at a few of them to explore, rest and to snorkel. 

The Dominican Republic lies east of Cuba and is not pictured above.

All of the above islands are part of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas which is scattered over an area of 100,000 square miles of ocean. Most of these islands are so small that you may have difficulty finding them on a map. And this might be a brain bender for some—the Bahamas are not part of the Caribbean. What? Yes, it's true. The Bahamas are not on the Caribbean Sea. They are in the Atlantic Ocean. See, it’s that geography stuff again. Geography can be hard.

It Was a Dark Night

It was a dark night on a black sea that knew how to keep its’ secrets. I’d trimmed the mains’l and jib smartly; on the open water there’s no room for dumb. A brightly illuminated chart plotter told me there were no other vessels within 100 miles in any direction. Also told me I was on course for the Dominican Republic. All alone in the dark. A red headlamp on my forehead and and only my pair of bare feet on the cockpit floor. 

Hdg-330 degrees; Boat speed-7.971 kts

The trade winds were blowing through my head and on to the place where they  are no longer the trades. Heading toward their own undoing. The thought appealed to my sense of melodrama; aren’t we all moving closer to our own undoing? But my coffee had gone cold long ago and without a fresh cup of joe, I couldn’t tease out anything more from that thought.

My empty coffee mug at the helm

So began the process to find the thermos of hot coffee in the cabin below. One of the mysteries of the night passage is the shifting of obstacles from wherever they had been placed in the daylight hours. Oh, there were clues of the shifting, certainly. The clanking, clunking, swooshing, ka-knock knocking of metal, glass bottles and floor baskets that didn’t like where I’d chosen to put them. Even I myself, was tethered to the boat to prevent my own displacement from where I belonged.  

author's feet

First order of business—stand up. While bracing myself of course, for the two or six tentative steps that put me into the companionway. Lurching unexpectedly forward, backward, sideways I can finally lean against the leeward wall to descend the steps to the galley. Ceiling handholds are what save me from flopping toward the port or the starboard once below.

Position of our boat, north of Bonaire
using an iPad

If memory serves me, which it does not always do, I had quite definitively wedged the huge thermos of hot coffee into a space in one of the stainless steel sinks and then stacked other things snugly around it. By rights, there it would have remained until my return. If “by rights” were to be applied, I would not have become entangled in a line hanging off the coach roof. I would not have missed the central handhold suspended over the galley and been forced to lunge for the other handhold in a moment of panic.

authors' silhouette in cockpit

As I said at the outset, there’s no room for dumb on the water. And so I proceeded cautiously, right foot braced against the step, left foot finding the floor as the left hand grasped the handhold and the right hand? The right hand was left to connect with the thermos by the light of the red glow of my headlamp. 

torso brace attached to safety bar

Now here’s a conundrum. With two hands holding the thermos and mug, there are no hands left over for hanging on to the boat. Problem solved by buckling myself into the torso brace which some clever person designed just for that purpose. And which was cleverly purchased for my use in the galley. That accomplished, my entire body was braced while I opened the thermos, and then the mug, and oh so carefully poured the hot coffee from one to the other. 

Sailing from Bonaire to Dominican Republic.  A nice sail.

Then once again, finding myself short a hand or two, wedging the thermos in the sink in order to attend to the cover on the mug, then wedging the mug while capping the thermos. The return up to the cockpit was at least as precarious as the trip down. But it is somehow accomplished.

And there I was once again, in the dark night on a black sea that knew how to keep its’ secrets. Trade winds were blowing and….what was that thought I had pondered before the coffee trip below? That profound thought that I had been about to unravel......?