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This is a beautiful little island in the Spanish Virgin Island group. The Spanish Virgins are a group of islands between Puerto Rico and the American Virgin Islands that are administratively part of Puerto Rico. Like in most parts of Puerto Rico we have visited people are as likely to address you in English as in Spanish—here maybe even more likely in English.

This island is one of the oldest wildlife sanctuaries in the western hemisphere. I’d guess less than 15% of the island is developed in any way. It has a population of around 2000. It was also one of the islands used for many years by the US Navy as a live-fire bombing range. There are posters around town reminding you to not pick up anything unusual you might see on the ground.

Culebra is home to Flamingo Beach. Rated, by those people whose business it is to do such things, as one of the top three beaches in the world. So far in our time here on the island we have seen exactly one flamingo.

The towers of the lift bridge in downtown Dewy, Culebra, Puerto Rico.

The main (actually the only) town on the island is Dewy. Named after the presidential candidate who famously lost to Truman in 1948. The town was relocated by the US Navy to put it “closer to the water.” Actually, to get it out of the way of the bombs they wanted to drop. The local story is that there were two fishing boats on the island who needed access to the ocean, so the Navy built a lift bridge over the canal so they would not have to take the long way round. The bridge hasn’t worked for years.

The town is well and truly on “Island Time.” Just up from the dinghy dock, there is a small grocery store that seemed to be closed more than it was open, but with no posted hours. Today we were in the bakery, and Karen asked what the deal was with the grocer’s hours. The answer was, “She opens when she feels like it. She lives across the street. When we see her head toward the store, we rush over to buy what we need.”

A hike on the wild side the other day showed us all kinds of interesting things. A Green Mango hummingbird sitting on its nest. Karen is really good at spotting these things, then it is my job to get a photo.

Wild cotton plants

Like on many of the arid Caribbean islands, a spices of cotton grows wild here. Birds love using the fibers to build their nests. The problem is the nest which would be quite cryptic if built of other materials, stand out dramatically when made of the snow white cotton fibers.

We have now received our hard copy of the Harmonie’s official documentation for the coming year. So if the weather gods cooperate we will be heading off to St Thomas in the American Virgin Islands tomorrow.

Well… sort of!

I posted our first “real” video to YouTube this evening about our fishing experiences in this part of Puerto Rico.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy seeing and hearing about our experiences.

At least some of the scenes are worth expanding to watch in full-screen mode.  You can see it here:

Putting it together was both fun and challenging.  I learned that video production is quite tough to do well.  There is SO much BAD video out there, I do not feel I needed to add to that dung heap!  I really want to hear from people about what they think I could do to make it better, and if they want to see more.

Most mornings I try to get at least one maintenance project done to keep Harmonie in ship-shape. Today’s project was to change the intake filter on the watermaker.  A pretty simple project, swapping out the old filter for a new one.  This is the filter than catches little bits of “stuff” that are in the incoming saltwater to keep it from contaminating the main reverse osmosis membranes.

Of course, on a boat there is no such thing as a “simple” project.  As I was reinstalling the filter I also worked to track down a tiny saltwater leak.  I found it in a few minutes on a high pressure line that is part of the watermaker system.  This kind of fitting doesn’t often leak, and when they do it is not normally something you can just tighten and make better.  Sure enough, I found a crack in the flared sealing surface. Taking it apart to inspect it just made it even worse, now the watermaker high pressure pump puts out a spray of saltwater across the engine room when it is running. This puts our water maker out of commission until a replacement high pressure hose can be obtained.

Good news, we have a mostly full fresh water tank.  Almost 700 liters of water will keep us going for quite a while.  More good news, there is a hydraulic hose fabricator on St Thomas, just 50 miles east of here who makes hoses like this.

It was our plan to head that direction anyway, now we just have a significantly higher motivation to get there.  We are waiting for delivery of the renewed documentation from the US Coast Guard, essentially Harmonie‘s registration paperwork.  As soon as that arrives here in Culebra, in a day or two, we’ll be headed off to the (relatively) big city of Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas.

Just because we are out here exploring paradise, doesn’t mean there are not chores to do. A typical morning on Harmonie starts with Bill getting up  first (Karen likes to sleep late) to run the generator and if we are someplace with clean clear water, we run the water maker at the same time and put some fresh water in the tanks. Typically, we drain our batteries down to about 65 to 75 percent of full over night.  Ninety minutes of generator time brings them back up to about 85%, and the solar panels take care of the rest over the course of a sunny day.  While the generator is running, Bill’s coffee and breakfast is made.

I try to get at least one “boat project” done every day.  Usually just simple maintenance, but sometimes a repair is in order.  We also have a few improvements and upgrades that occasionally bubble up to the top of the priority list.

Occasionally, there are administrative things to take care off.  Like today.  US Customs and Border Protection has a “Small Vessel Reporting System” that allows a boat to check back into the USA with just a phone call–if you have previously signed up and been interviewed.  We have done the web application and our interview is this afternoon here in Culebra.  Hopefully that will speed up our check-in the next time we return from foreign waters to the USA.

This afternoon we will do some food shopping, and we’ll be headed off toward the American Virgin Islands, landing in St Thomas where we have some boat supplies to source.  We will have a bit of recalibration to do as we move into the American and British Virgin Islands.  For a long time most of the anchorages we have been in have been quite empty.  We have been sharing our “space” with just few boats at a time.  Where we are headed next, it will not be like that. Every anchorage will be crowded.

One of the things I have been working on and learning is a bit of video editing.  The technical skills come pretty fast–it takes a bit longer to workout what works “artistically”.  Hopefully in a few days we’ll be posting our first little “show”.

Sometimes I think that I repeat myself too much when I say, “We had another delightful sail.”  The reason I get to say that so often is that we are very careful in our passage planning and look for the easy weather window.  So I get to start off this posting once again by saying we had a delightful sail!

We picked up on short notice out heading east when the Tradewinds calmed a bit earlier than forecast.  Our original intention was to stop at Vieques, but things went so well we would have gotten there at 3AM, and would have then needed to heave-to offshore to wait for sufficient light for a safe approach.  Karen suggested that we continue on, so we reset our sights further east for Isla de Culebra, arriving in early morning.

We found Culebra to be a delightful island, quite busy with cruising sailboats, and relatively undeveloped.  Likely a place you have never heard of, it is halfway between the main island of Puerto Rico and St Thomas. It is one of the “Spanish Virgin Islands” that are part of Puerto Rico. From here we can see the main island of Puerto Rico to the west, and St Thomas to the east. We are anchored in the main harbor near town.

The population of the island is about 2000, and for the kind of place that it is, it seems relatively well off.  It is a very popular vacation and weekend getaway from Puerto Rico as well as a popular spot for boats passing through the area to stay for a while.

After spending yesterday recovering from our overnight passage, we went exploring a bit today, hit the local grocery, and had a marvelous dinner out.  Our plans for tomorrow are to move around to the northern part of the island where the snorkeling is supposed to be excellent.

The Tradewinds stalled a day early, so we took off this afternoon like a herd of turtles making eastward progress along the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico.

Right now we are about due south of Punta Tuna, on an overnight passage to the town of Esperanza on the island of Vieques. The winds are now so light (less than 3 knots) that the surface of the ocean is almost oily in the light of the setting sun. Our trusty Volvo diesel is pushing us along. We should be arriving at our next anchorage very early in the morning.

So far today we have seen a manatee, and a couple sea turtles, along with the usual collection of birds and flying fish.

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.