Leaving the Bahama’s wasn’t something to take lightly, as it meant we would have to press into the east winds to the Dominican Republic, then the east winds to Puerto Rico, then the east winds to Antigua and finally south, down to Grenada, where we would spend the hurricane season. The other option would have been to spend Hurricane season on the US east Coast.

We decided to leave the Bahamas and go for Grenada. Our first leg was planned to go to the Dominican Republic, but once underway we realized we did not have an exit document from the Bahamas, so the DR would not let us in. It didn’t take Cathie long to come up with plan “B”, let’s press on to Puerto Rico, where the document wasn’t needed. This would only be one day further, so we decided to go for it.

We did not have any extra fuel, and would be sailing upwind, so we had to plan accordingly for our 450 nm trip. We started to sail, and thought we were doing quite well going 6 knots, but quickly learned the difference between heading,” Where the boat is pointing” and course, ” Where the boat is going”. Even though we were tacking 45 degrees into the wind, the boat was only going 55 degrees into the wind. I’m sure there’s a trigonometry function that would prove the 6 NM was only 2NM towards our destination. We watched the wind angles closely, and when the wind shifted to one side we would tack to the other side. We used our fuel wisely and spoiler alert, we did make it.

After four days at sea, we were starting to get close to Puerto Rico. When Cathie or I would get up to relieve the person on watch, the first question was always, what’s the DTD, distance to destination. It finally got below 50 NM, which meant we were getting close to Puerto Rico, but also we were in the infamous “Mona passage”, between Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. This is a rough stretch of water to begin with and as we were entering it, a weather warning came over the VHF radio of a sever storm (40 nm winds,, lightning and large hail) leaving the north west corner of Puerto Rico and tracking towards us.

We were watching our radar, looking out the windows for storm cells, dodging storm cells, dodging freighter traffic, and then…… out of nowhere a large vessel was stopped about 1/4 NM in front of us. It didn’t look like the tankers and freighters we were monitoring and did not show up on our radar/AIS. This vessel didn’t seem like it was moving at all …. were our eyes playing tricks on us? We were very confused by this vessel. Then the vessel started up and left. Hmm…., We noticed we were 25NM from Puerto Rico, and had just crossed a red dashed line on the chart, called the international border. We suspect the vessel was just Puerto Rico border/drug patrol checking out why we were changing headings so often and looking suspicious as we approached Puerto Rico. Next the nasty weather cleared up, and we made our way into the anchorage. Cathie cleared us in over the internet and we were done, except for a celebration beverage.