Passage to the Dominican Republic - goodbye Bahamas!
After almost 3 months in the Bahamas making memories it was time to move on last week. We were sad to leave our buddy boat and other friends behind, it was great hanging out with them and the kids just loved being independent whilst making the most of new friends, the beaches, the water, and imaginations running wild as they built forts and homes in the sand with scraps they found on the beach.
We were watching a weather window for about 10 days as the winds looked like they were going to shift away from the east for a few days, seas calm down and we met a group of other cruisers who were also looking at the same window to leave Georgetown, where we had definitely done our time (think a retiree’s tropical winter playground playing volleyball or having sundowners, like Florida is to the ‘snowbirds’ playing pickleball :) ). Annabelle and I both went up to mast to do checks on the rigging in Goat Cay, our mast is 75ft up so is pretty high, but the view from the top at sunset was worth it, just magical on our last evening there.
We left early the next morning, streaming out the cut with 5 or so other boats in a line, all headed for the Dominican Republic. Our initial intent had been to go to Puerto Rico, but we didn’t feel the weather window would last quite long enough for us to get all the way there. So we decided to learn from some of our other passages and bank this one by just doing the 400 or so miles to the DR. What a magical few days! We finally got to sail a passage for 2 of the days, the third day the wind dies so we had to motor sail sadly. We took down our decidedly tired looking Bahamian flag, patched a repair on our spinnaker on the second day when we noticed a small tear on the top of it. This was the first time we got Annabelle and Oscar involved in night watches. They did 8 - 11 pm each night of the passage, and it was a great experience for both of them to learn how to look at the map at night, the radar, be observant on AIS (that tracks other boats). Pete did the 12 - 4am part of the night and then I got up to do 4am till 8 or 9am.
It is very quiet and slow during the day on a passage - we didn’t have the internet on all the time so there was no school, Pete did a bit of work, but generally it is a lot of reading and lego playing. We had provisioned well this time, made dinners ahead of time (lasagne, chicken fajitas etc.) and lots of snacks. We had fishing lines out all day every day and sadly lost 2 fish off the lines, one that was especially big that Pete reeled in for about 45 minutes before it took the hook and dropped off (we think it was a tuna). On the third day of passage, having passed Turks and Caicos and officially left the Bahamas, we decided to push forward to get to the DR by nightfall, rather than stay slow and have another night at sea. Before we pushed on however, we dropped our sails and stopped the boat, as our navigation said that we were in 12,000ft of water. We were about 50 miles off the coast of Haiti at the time. And we jumped in the water. I found it quite eerie to look down with my mask on into the blue blue water, which was amazingly clear. I took a photo with my phone in the water which are the photos below. We all swam, the kids seemingly unperturbed by the deepness below them. Luckily we saw nothing (fish wise) below us either! Very cool experience to tick off the bucket list!
For safety on board, no one goes forward of the helm station without a life jacket on unless the captain says its ok and we are in very calm waters. At night whoever is on watch has a life jacket on (offshore type) and is strapped on to the boat. We have a 6-person life raft on board and a large variety of flares, an EPIRB (An emergency position indicating radio beacon) which is a small electronic device that can help search and rescue authorities find people in distress that we would activate if something catastrophic happened. We also strap a personal EPIRB to the person on watch at night (does the same thing as the big one it is just in case someone fell overboard). We have yellow jack-lines running down each side of the boat on passage so that if someone does have to go forward, they strap themselves onto this. We also have very good binoculars that have a great trick at night of pulling in any light, so even on a seemingly pitch black night, you can pick up things on the horizon. We followed the list of recommendations that the ARC demands (if you were sailing across the Atlantic) so that we have top of the range stuff for all our passages. https://www.worldcruising.com/CMS/CMS/Library/Safety_Regs/WCC_SafetyEquipmentRequirements_2024_ENG_WebSec.pdf
Late afternoon we spotted land which was first Haiti, and then the Dominican Republic, both situated on the island of Hispaniola. Immediately the landscape looked fundamentally different from the months we had been in the Bahamas, very mountainous, and we could see miles out the clouds lifting above the land. We arrived in the Marina around 7pm just as the light was fading, met by the DR Navy who kindly offered to come back the next morning to check us in as we were tired. It was a great passage and the sort we wish that we could always have! And excited to explore the DR more for the next few weeks now!
