Final Days In Samana, DR and Our First Attempt to Sail to Puerto Rico

Hello there! We finally have internet and we can catch you up on what we have been up to for the last two weeks or so. As most of you know we made it to Puerto Rico! Woo Hoo! We still have lots photos to share from our last days in DR so we’re gonna make it simple and just post them for you to enjoy.

This is Moon all tucked in our little protected spot that we found to anchor in during the day in Samana where the anchorage was nice and calm.

Land of palm trees!!

We rented a motorcycle and took a tour of the area and visited the beach town of Las Galeras. There were so many small and beautiful beaches and rugged coastlines along the way. It was a wet and rainy day but we had a blast!

Look at this local tour boat…no safety railing on the top…scary!

Samana was the land of rainbows.

If you remember reading back in one of our last blogs we had mentioned that we tried to sail to PR once before and we not successful. Well, here’s the story behind that adventure…

We checked the weather and finally found a nice window to sail to PR. First we had to sail out of Samana Bay which is about 20 miles to reach the north coast and begin our sail to the east and to PR. We found that the bay itself was pretty ruff with confused waves and different sea states every few miles or so it was hard work for us to make it out of the bay and took most of the afternoon and into the early evening. As we were finally making some headway and the sun was going down things were starting to look better and the seas were a bit calmer. I was on my first watch. The night was becoming gradually darker and my eyes were getting adjusted to the darkness as we were sailing along just a couple of miles from the islands jagged reefs. I thought that this was going to be a good motor-sail across and had dreams of America swimming in my head…what kind of shopping malls and food stores would we find, what delicious foods were in store for us that we had not had seen in over a year? What exciting things would we get to do once we had gotten there? I was excited that we were on our way to the land of opportunity! Then all of a sudden…thunk! The engine completely shut down and there was just silence. Just as I started to holler for Brian to come up on deck his head pops up from down below…what the heck just happened, he asks.

I say that I have no idea and that the engine just shut down on it’s own. Brian rushes around checking the engine and pulls up the floorboards checking the drive shaft trying to determine what was going on. When he looked at the prop it was obvious what had happened. There was a HUGE fishing net tangled in it. There was not anything that we could do to get it off except for Brian to go to the back of the boat and cut it off. Scary thing to do in the dark and rising and falling seas. This net was something else…it was bigger than our boat and ¼ inch thick…the kind of net that is used to catch big game fish! I had the easy part of holding the flashlight but Brian has the hard and scary part of clipping his harness to the back of the boat and hanging off with cutters trying to get at least some of this net off of our prop so that we could sail. All I can say is that Brian once again is my hero! He was not able to get all of the net cut away but he was able to get enough off so that we were able to sail back to Samana the closest place we could safely anchor.

Not what you want to see stuck on your prop!

This is just a small part of the net and fishing buoys that Brian had to cut off our prop!

Brian checking to make sure that all of the garbage is clear of our prop and shaft.

What a night! The next morning Brian was able to dive down and get the rest of the net out of the prop and we also discovered that we had picked up a couple of fishing buoys too…what a mess! Thankfully though the prop, shaft and engine were not damaged. This is just one of those things that all sailors cringe at hearing. At night there is no way to see these obstacles floating in the sea and no way to avoid them. We’re just glad that our story has a happy ending and that we made it through it safely!

Next up we’re going to share with you our safe and successful trip to PR. Take care and we’ll post again soon and let you know how nice it is in PR.

Jennifer and Brian