March 13–25, 2006 -- Culebra and Vieques, Puerto Rico

We left St. Thomas early in the morning, in hopes of catching the remains of the night lee (the offshore calm that results from the cooling of the land), but to no avail, as the wind blew strongly and we had a another rollicking sail across the 24-mile channel. We entered Ensenada Honda, Culebra, Puerto Rico, very carefully, paying close attention to the buoys and ranges marking the channel. The quaint little town of Dewey, Culebra, as well as having a large and very sheltered bay, has the advantage of being a convenient place to check in with US Customs and Immigration. A short walk to the island’s airport took us to the Customs office and a pleasant officer who stamped our passports and sold us a new US cruising permit ($19USD), good for a year anywhere in the US.


After a showery night, up and down closing and opening windows and hatches, we headed out to Vieques, 22 miles to the south. Again, the seas were challenging. The captain keeps promising it is going to get better!


When we came this way five years ago, most of Vieques was still used as a US Navy shelling range and was not particularly hospitable to cruisers. Since then, it has been returned to civilian use, and the very beautiful bays and beaches are now available to us. Shell-gathering takes on a whole new meaning here, though, and going ashore in the previously restricted areas is not recommended.


We crept into one of these bays after our rough trip from Culebra, thrilled to find absolutely flat water over a multi-hued lagoon, about two miles long. There was not a building in sight, and only one other boat, some distance away. The absolutely calm, quiet, and dark night gave us a wonderful sleep -- but, to quote the guide book, “After munitions cleanup, taking perhaps years, you can look forward to rampant development to spoil these beautiful coves more than bombs could.”


Our next stop was off the small town of Esperanza, where we took a free DNR mooring in very shallow water just off the beach. We rowed the dinghy ashore to explore the town, found free internet at the library, and walked and had a swim at the next beach, a mile-long halfmoon of white sand, where again we saw many groups of college-age kids enjoying a spring break vacation.

We were up before dawn to take advantage of the night lee on the crossing from Vieques to the big island of Puerto Rico, and this time we got lucky. The wind was light for the crossing, and the breeze which came up as we motor-sailed along the shore was behind us.


The south coast of Puerto Rico is very beautiful, with many reef-protected white-sand beaches and wonderfully sheltered hurricane-holes. Our next anchorage was Salinas, one of these almost fully-enclosed hideaways. This cruiser-friendly spot makes it easy to want to stay. We took full advantage of the shore facilities, doing our laundry for $1 per load (compared with $16 Euros in Martinique!), getting a new load of reading material from the book exchange, and finding a sailmaker who did some same-day repairs on our canvas.


We found a restaurant called “The Cruisers’ Galley”, where they had excellent food at great prices, and free internet, where I spent most of a day working on our blogspot. All this with free coffee and freshly-baked cookies, and two big slices of saran-wrapped banana bread to take home!!











Salinas was a friendly stop for meeting other cruisers. We took an instant liking to Gerry and Terri on “Gymnopodes”, from Saskatoon. They were headed south, but we had lunch together and a good visit.





We paid a return visit to Gilligan’s Island, a favorite from our trip south in 2001. The calm, clear water, spectacular scenery, and uncrowded conditions were still the same. As we were there on a weekend, there were lots of families arriving on the small ferry or bringing their own motorboat to enjoy a picnic on the little island park.

We had a wonderful swim in the clear water of the mangrove channels, and swam and walked along a gorgeous beach a short distance away.

Feeling some pressure to get to Boqueron to do some chores and be ready for a weather window to cross the Mona Pass to the Dominican Republic, we stayed just one night at Gilligan’s, then had an easy motoring trip to Cabo Rojo, at the the south-west corner of Puerto Rico, where we turned north and went into the anchorage in the wide bay at Boqueron. As we were rounding the Cape, our 12-year-old GPS gave an incorrect latitude and longitude reading for the first time. It had been giving us a few problems for a while, but this mistake was unforgivable, and we decided the GPS would have to be replaced. It is an integral part of our auto-pilot and radar systems, and an indispensable aid to paper charts for navigation.