Tuesday 30th January

Ponce,
Puerto Rico

17 57.0 N
66 37.7 W

It beats me how I get talked into early morning starts – I am not a morning person and Gerry wanted to begin the day at 06.00hrs – I mean is that even a time???? Whining aside we got up at the allotted time – how I hate the alarm clock – and did the last few essential things required before hoisting the hook and making our way out of the harbour – in the dark! Jim followed us out and another boat followed him – what is it with these people, can’t they sleep or something? We watched the sun rise just as we cleared the harbour entrance and yes it was very pretty. Rounding the point and passing Cabot Rojo lighthouse, we were glad to see that the forecast was holding true – very light winds and only a 2 to 3 foot swell, unfortunately the wind was on the nose, I’m beginning to think that it never blows in any other direction, so we had no choice but to motor. As the morning wore on the wind clocked around just enough for us to be able to fly the jib which helped increase our speed by at least a knot. Our destination for the day was to be Ponce (pon –say) – 40 miles away. It doesn’t sound far but it took us almost 8 hours to cover that much ground. We arrived at the entrance to Ponce Harbour / marina and decided to go into a slip for the night. Try as we might we could not raise anyone from the marina on the radio so in the end we motored to the fuel dock and asked them for a slip, they gave us very flexible directions and left us to find our own way in, tie ourselves up and then let the office know we had done it!. Tying ourselves up was a trial as the finger piers are very small and there was no one to help catch lines. It would have been better if we hadn’t been driven into the dock by the wind at the time – it would have made quite a funny TV skit if someone had recorded us but it didn’t seem like much fun to us at the time. Once we had tied ourselves up to the dock Gerry went ahead and booked us into the place whilst I got out the power cords, water hoses and took “stuff” from the cockpit down below. Gerry hosed down the boat whilst I prepared a late lunch then we logged on to the internet to retrieve and answer email that was waiting. Later in the evening we went into the Yacht club and had a light dinner before coming back to the boat and falling into bed.