“Six days and seven nights” with Mike and Gloria
As many of you know, it has been a long standing tradition to have our visitors write a guest blog. Here is Dave’s entry …
I just stepped off Cotinga after a whirlwind tour of the Dominican Republic spending a week with Mike and Gloria. They made my transit way too easy by picking me up at the Puerto Plato airport in their rental car, and gamely weaving back to the boat through scooters and trucks and road construction and all kinds of mayhem. An extra day with the car enabled us to eat out (excellent food!), stock up, and visit a beautiful and remote beach (Playa Rincon) that was not accessible to Cotinga. The DR has 14 national parks, and we spent three remarkable days in a protected bay in Los Haitises park. We motored the little DD all over the place, one day up a fantastic river into the Mangroves (shaded with overhanging branches and more birds than you can shake a stick at). The mangrove river tour is a treat for park visitors (who are usually guided, arrive by bus, and travel by boat across the bay to the caves). Another day we explored three different limestone caves (see Mike's outstanding photos!). Each day we started the evening with a beautiful look shoreward at the three dimensional karst topography cast into greater relief by the long shadows of the end of the day, another great meal (mustard crusted salmon was over the top), and then a relaxing sit in the cockpit with a few wisecracks from Gloria about the wackiest parts of the day, staying awake just long enough to find Sirius and the dipper and the North star, and look for the aligned planets before turning in. Departing Los Haitises we headed back to the Puerto Bahia resort and prepared for an overnight westward leg. The 115 miles were just long enough to make it real and make me feel like I was helping get Cotinga closer to home. We left around 1700 and got to Ocean World (west of Puerto Plata) around 1100 the following day, We motored or motor sailed most of the passage, not without excitement as the entire navigation and electronics system shut down around 2230. Things were sporty as we were on a lee shore at night in the tropics where there are few lighted navigational aids, but we had a good half-full moon and our trip west was across safe bays from one cape to the next. Mike was quick and efficient in setting up a backup Navionics plotting package (with GPS) on the iPad, and a paper chart backup with handheld GPS fixes penciled in for additional redundancy. Off watch I went back to sleep wondering how we would get into the harbor on a lee shore without the depth sounder, but Mike got the NMEA2000 network back online just after dawn. Things like this remind me how much skill and experience Mike and Gloria have accumulated.
The following day in Ocean World we rested, I was able to download the Caribbean bird pack into Merlin and tick some of the cool birds that Gloria and Mike pointed out (fav is the tody of course) and did some boat chores. Mike checked and replaced the water pump impeller, finding that only two of its 12 paddles remained. We were pretty lucky as an overheated engine without navigation on a lee shore would have really tested us. The national motto of the DR is, "DR has it all" and it rings true - what a fantastic country. I only mention the movie (Six Days and Seven Nights) because it has such a tropical vibe, and our seven days were so tropical in all ways, from beaches to birds to lush vegetation to hills and caves, turtles and whales, muddy shores and blue water sailing. In Los Haitises we even encountered a film crew setting up to shoot an episode of Survivor or something similar, where a young filmmaker with a headset and radio asked us if we could 'come back later'!
Dave
All photos from Dave …
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