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We have moved further east and are now in Bahia de Jobos, our jumping off spot to the Spanish Virgin Islands. Right now we are tucked up in a mangrove creek, well sheltered from winds and waves.

After a long series of short coastal hops, our next run is longer, about 50 miles as the gull flies to Vieques, the first of the Spanish Virgins. Since this is pretty much straight upwind, we are back in weather watch mode.

Right now we are between seasons here. The cold fronts of winter no longer get this far south, and the tropical waves that create summer weather here are a month away, at least. The trade winds are a bit lighter, but more consistent.

If the weather models are right, we should have a break in two days when we can work our way to Vieques without beating into the wind.

We have a day of exploring this beautiful remote anchorage, and then we are off sailing again.

We have a longer term plan: make our way east until about May 1, then turn turn around and head back toward the Bahamas and, ultimately, the US northeast and New England for the summer.

Sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right. In a recent post I wrote about fishing for an hour and catching nothing big enough to keep for dinner. Followed by fishing for an hour and catching two fish just big enough to make one dinner for Karen and I. Keep reading for updates…

Note:  It will take me a day or two to get the video uploaded, it will have to wait until we get a better internet connection.

We finished our business in Ponce Wednesday where some packages caught up with us, and we topped off the boat with fuel. Just in case you are wondering, the last time we filled the boat’s tank was in Florida in December. In the three months since then, we have bought a total of about 83 gallons of diesel, and that includes what we picked up yesterday. The boat’s fuel tank holds about 168 gallons, so in three months we used only about a half tank of fuel.  We use fuel obviously for the main engine to move the boat when there is no wind, but also to run the generator.  For about 60 to 90 minutes every morning the generator runs to top up the batteries, and to supply the power to run the reverse osmosis unit that makes fresh water from seawater.

Here on the south coast of Puerto Rico during the day the trade winds dominate, blowing mostly from the east or northeast. If you try to fight them, you have a tough, rough, wet, and bumpy ride to get further east.  After sunset, on the other hand, the land cools down, and the sea stays warm, so you get a classic land breeze blowing from land to sea.  If you stay close to shore, you can make progress eastward on an easy reach instead of a rough and tumble beat. 

This morning we weighed anchor at about 7AM to catch the last of that land breeze and get us back to our jumping off point for further eastward travel at Isla Caja de Muerta.  Our timing was perfect, and we had an easy, comfortable sail over to the island. 

Before we dropped anchor I picked a spot to try a bit of what I thought I had learned

A very tasty red hind grouper.

about fishing here. Proving that old dogs CAN learn new tricks, in 20 minutes I had three nice sized grouper in the boat.  Enough fish for a week’s worth of dinners.  We had the first fillet baked in creole tomato sauce tonight.  Absolutely delicious. Karen liked it so much, she suggested we stay an extra day here and put more grouper in the freezer.

Green sea turtle up for air.

By 10AM we were comfortably anchored as the tradewinds built back to their normal daytime strength of 15 to 25 knots.  Karen was entertained by a number of turtles (at least 3, maybe 5 or 6) that went about their turtle business around the boat along with brown boobies, and (her favorite) frigatebirds.

Meanwhile, I invented an underwater camera

Juvenile brown booby patrols the air.

trap to see what I could bait up with the grouper carcasses. 

I tried twice with the camera trap, day and night.  I was really surprised by what showed up in the daytime video…  a pair of remoras. Fish with flat heads that attach themselves to other, much larger, fish which they follow around and scavenge food scraps from.  We have seen them before treating Harmonie as their host. I guess they have just been hanging around the boat hoping for food. 

Watching the remoras on video it is obvious that their sense of smell is better than their eyesight.  Although the come over to the area of the carcass within a few minutes, they initially poke at the camera.  Then at the lead sinker anchoring the fish carcass.  It seems they only find the real food when they blunder onto it.  After a half hour of pulling on it, they really haven’t actually eaten any significant fraction of it.

At night, I was surprised—again.  The grouper carcass attracted no attention at all.  The lights, however, did quickly attract a cloud of plankton and fish larvae.  Before long we had a small grunt who set himself up as the beneficiary of the bright lights and was picking off what he considered the tastiest bits of the plankton cloud.

At Karen’s request we stayed to catch more grouper, or at least that was the plan.  In the morning we went back to the reef where we had success yesterday, and on our second drift off into deep water I was retrieving the jig rapidly from 100 feet down when I was bit–hard–by something that immediately ran off a lot of line.  Five minutes of spirited struggle later, and I had an eight pound bigeye tuna on deck.  Not at all what I was expecting,  and a surprising catch in so close to shore, but as one of the most highly rated fish for sushi, we’ll take it!

Saturday was our day to explore Isla Caja de Muertos.  The island is part of the Puerto Rico Park system, and like any park it has its rules.  Like any place aspiring to international cosmopolitanism, your signs can’t have text–someone might not understand them!  They have too have pictograms.  Most of these make sense to me, but some I look at with what I assume can only be provincial befuddlement. I really think I would come closer to understanding that second one from the left on the second row if it was in Spanish!

The island has a nice beach and a ferry to the main island, so on the weekends it is busy, but not overly crowded.  It really can’t get TOO crowded, because there is only one ferry a day (arrives at 9:30, leaves at 3:15) so the island’s population is limited to one ferry load, plus the full time resident caretaker. It is quite a beautiful and interesting place.  It’s a shame many boats treat this as an overnight stop and take off without exploring.

The only buildings on the island are some very basic infrastructure for the beach, the caretakers residence, and the Spanish colonial era lighthouse, which is still in operation, although not with the original lamp or mechanicals.

The original Spanish lighthouse building from 1889 on top of the hill.

Once the stucco weathers off, the bricks underneath dissolve pretty quickly.

The island is small and in the prevailing wind shadow of the main island, so it gets little in the way of regular rainfall. It has the largest and densest stands of cactus I have ever seen. Some scrub trees, and vines and you have a thick, spiny tangle of vegetation that I can not imagine trying to move through without a trail.

The trail through the cactus thicket.

Some of the cactus are over 30 feet high.

If would have been interesting to spend the night and watch some of these large flow buds open.

Many of the cactus were covered in very large fresh flower buds, but we saw no open flowers.  Karen suggested that they are probably night-blooming and, because of the size of the flowers, that they are pollinated by bats.

We saw a variety of animals.  A few large iguanas. Unlike other places we have been, here they are very much scared of people and scurry off at first sight.  There were a wide variety of smaller lizards. In one very narrow band of height as we climbed the hill, there were a lot of large hermit crabs. Curious new fact:  hermit crabs can make noise.  Really!  They squeal when disturbed. The only mammals we saw were rats.

Many of the hardwood trees came with their own large and active termite nests.

The climb up the hill to the lighthouse was not too high (250 feet) but quite steep, and completely worth it for the view. Looking south from the top of the island, the next land would be Venezuela on the other side of the Caribbean Sea.  The beach to the east (left) side of the island is a protected nesting area for green and hawksbill sea turtles.  There are quite a number of turtles to be seen here in the anchorage.

Looking south from the lighthouse on Isla Caja de Muertos.  Harmonie is visible riding to her anchor on the right side of the photo.

After getting back to Harmonie, we took the dinghy out again to see if we could catch some dinner.  It wasn’t long before I landed a small grouper.  Pretty, but a bit small for the table. Back into the water he went.

A little later and I brought up a lizard fish.  A toothy critter—but also a bit small to eat, so again, back to the water. 

The water is quite clear here, so Karen was watching the lizardfish as he dove straight down to his home on the bottom 60 feet or so below…  but he didn’t make it.  “Something just ate him!”  Something very large darted into view and made lunch out of him.  Just a few seconds later my jig was dropping down to the bottom pretty much on the same track, and the same thing happened—something very large grabbed it and swam off.  I only had it hooked for a few seconds before sharp teeth cut off the line.  Almost certainly a large barracuda.

I ended up without catching dinner on Saturday, but on Sunday managed to get both a bigger grouper and a snapper that made quite a tasty fish fry!

Right now we are at anchor back in the Ponce harbor.  We have a package waiting for us in the office at the Yacht and Fishing Club, and then we are off on our adventures again.

Today we decided to leave the Ponce Club Nautico and go anchor out. We completed all of our shopping and resupply efforts, returned our rental car, and needed to get away from the crowds coming to the marina for the fishing tournament this weekend. The staff at the club has been delightful, and helped a lot with orienting us to the local area.

We are now anchored off of Isla Caja de Muertos, or Coffin Island. A much prettier location than its name might indicate. The only downside out here is we have a very tenuous internet connection, so our postings will be by satphone, which means without pictures.

Getting out of the harbor gets us a huge benefit: cool breezes! On land it is hot and humid. Out here, only 10 miles away, it is delightfully cool and comfortable. It’s interesting, as we move from place to place we find we are always glad to arrive, and always just as happy to move on. I guess that means we are moving at a comfortable and happy pace!

We’ll be here for a few days, we have one more errand to run in Ponce early next week. Tomorrow I have some projects to do on the boat in the morning, then we’ll be taking the dinghy off to explore the island.

Yesterday we took the chance to explore the island by car.  The highlight of our short trip was a visit to the El Yunque National Forest–the only tropical rainforest run by the US Forest Service.  We were lucky to be there on a day when the wind was blowing mostly from the south, the opposite from the normal trade winds, so even at the higher elevations it was not raining.  Even though it wasn’t actively raining, it was not in any way “dry”!  The area we chose to explore on foot was a palm forest.  It was quite noisy as the huge palm fronds thrashed each other overhead in even the slightest breeze.

Everything was green, if it wasn’t green it was a flower.  Karen would pick out the orchids hanging from the various trees. Unfortunately none were in bloom. Every where you heard the constant call of the coqui, the tiny tree frog with the onomatopoeic name that is native to the island.  Like many rain forests, precipitation levels and temperatures vary greatly with elevation, and exposure direction so that each hill has its own individual eco system.

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The host of the blog system we use supplies a number of metrics that are probably very important to someone doing this as a financial venture, but only of casual interest to us.  Still, it is interesting to see where people are who have read our postings here.  Here is a list of countries from which people have come to our humble blog in the last 30 days:

• United States
• Australia
• Germany
• Sweden
• France
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• United Arab Emirates
• Austria
• Greece
• Switzerland
• Portugal
• St. Lucia
• Netherlands
• Italy
• Sint Maarten
• Thailand
• Saudi Arabia
• Ireland
• Spain
• Chile
• Martinique
• British Virgin Islands
• Montenegro
• South Africa

In many cases the connections are from other Amel owners who are interested in some of the details about boat projects we have posted, others are from Karen’s worldwide network of orchid friends, others are from friends and acquaintances we have made along the way, oh, and not to forget family!

(Karen says: “Hi Lynn!, Hi Dale!”)

We have now finished our excursion to Florida, and completed successfully everything on our list–with a few bonus items.

We successfully transferred our official residence to Florida, and got our Florida drivers licenses to prove it.  We completed the paperwork for our new mailing address.  We got our doctor appointments complete, and our shopping done.

We got lucky when a rocket launch was rescheduled for the very weekend we were going to be driving up the coast of Florida.  So we arranged a stop in the Cape Canaveral area to see if we could get a closeup view of a Delta IV launch of a military communications satellite.

We spend much of the day at the Kennedy Space Center.  It was very much a mixed bag.  Lots of very interesting stuff to see, and a lot of Disney-like golly-gee-wizz. Unlike a lot of museums and other similar attractions, there was a layer of the information presentation that was actually geared to the educated adult.

We stayed to watch the launch, originally scheduled at twilight, a delay pushed it back to a full darkness.  I learned that photographing a nighttime launch of a large rocket is VERY hard…

The Delta IV is one of the largest rockets currently in use, but it is just a fraction of the size of the Space Launch System that NASA is developing for deep space exploration. Launches of those rockets (beginning next year) should be truly awesome events–literally earthshaking.

Now we are back on Harmonie getting things put back together and stowed.  Some provisioning, and exploring of Puerto Rico and we will be ready to move on again.

We had an uneventful flight back to the Miami area yesterday.  In three hours we covered as much ocean as took us two months by harbor hoping on Harmonie.

While here we are going to handle some doctor checkups, shopping for things that are either hard to find or expensive in the islands, and manage the logistics of getting our official Florida address and drivers licenses.

This is the first time since we bought the boat that we will have left her unattended.  It’s odd that should be stressful, after all most boats spend almost all their lives at the dock with nobody aboard, but somehow it still, just doesn’t seem right to leave her alone!

We arrived yesterday at the Ponce Fishing and Yacht Club where they have dock space available for us while we travel back to Florida to do some logistics.

The fishing and yacht club is an interesting place.  Almost all the boats based here are large sportfisherman, big game fishing is obviously the entertainment of choice.  In two weeks they will be hosting their big event of the year, a fishing tournament targeting marlin and mahi-mahi.  Lots of activity around prepping the grounds and the boats.

Amazingly, in this out of the way harbor where there are a total of maybe two dozen sailboats, including us, yesterday three Amel’s arrived.  Us, plus a newer model out of France, the other an older model out of the USA. While these are popular boats, there aren’t THAT many of them around.  Karen’s theory is probably a good one, that Amels tend to be used for long range cruising in higher percentage than other brands of boats.  They just spend less time sitting at the dock!

We have been anchored off the town of La Parguera for a while now.  The town is small and compact, without a lot of services, but does have a small grocery and some restaurants.  Some times when you are cruising you are active and exploring, other times you are lazy and relaxed.  Recently, we have been lazy and relaxed, hence the lack of dramatic reporting here!

Today we moved the boat a few miles east away from town, and away from the music of the bars at night.  It is now SOOOO quiet.

We have not been totally unproductive, rather we have been trying to setup some logistics unique to the lifestyle we lead. What to do about mail?  And when someone “official” asks “Where do you live?” How are we supposed to answer?

We have not had a single simple answer to those things, but that is about to change.  We are about to be come official residents of the great state of Florida.  Why Florida?  First there is a commercial service near St Augustine that that is set up specifically to help people like us with mail and other such needs.  Florida also has no state income tax, compared to California that is a very good thing.  To implement this, we need to travel to Florida, so we are going to put the boat in a marina, and fly back to handle those mundane details like drivers licenses and such.

So over the next few days we will be working our way another 20 miles further east to get to the Ponce Fishing and Yacht Club where we have reservations for a slip for the boat while we travel.

The town of La Parguera at sunset.

Typical afternoon weather, scattered showers moving past the mangrove cays.