La Parguera

Since leaving Mayaguéz, we spent a couple of days at Boquerón, and now we are settled in at the town of La Payguera on the south coast of Puerto Rico.

Boquerón is nestled at the end of a large bay, a very pretty town. The waterfront was undergoing the finishing touches to a major facelift to make it more attractive to tourists. Almost all of the tourists here are locals visiting from other parts of the island. The town is totally dead during the week, but on the weekends it becomes party central. It seems every college age person on this half of the island is here. The music is loud. And not just loud. All afternoon the beach featured karaoke–very very loud, and very very bad. (Is there ever GOOD karaoke??) The local favorite is the old Sinatra standard, “My Way.” We must have been tortured by at least 6 different renditions of that song, and each of them I am sure set Old Blue Eyes spinning in his grave…

We explored a bit on foot, and Kevan had a local friend who was good enough to drive us around and give us a local’s eye view.

We weighed anchor and sailed south, then east, toward La Parguera. Another tourist town, but with less of a party-hardy reputation. After arriving here, Kevan felt that he needed to head back to the mainland to take care of some family business. We were sorry to see him go, he has been the perfect boat guest for several weeks.

The harbor here is a small maze of mangrove islands and shallow reefs that give good protection from waves in all directions. Every morning about 10AM the wind starts, blowing from the east at 20 to 30 knots. Shortly after sunset, it dies back to near nothing for the night.

The highlight of our visit here so far was the exploration of the mangrove creek that separates Isla Curvea from the mainland. A mile long channel about 12 feet wide, with mangrove branches arching over the top. Birds and fish everywhere. Supposedly, there are a troop of 400 wild monkeys on the island, but we found no evidence of them.