Our stop in Punta Patillas was very brief. We arrived yesterday around 2pm and after dinner and a few hours sleep, headed out around midnight. We didn’t get to do anything in town so, although it looked cute, we can’t really say much about it.
We arrived in Cayo Obispo (an island just outside Fajardo – northeast coast of Puerto Rico) about 8am. The trip was quite calm, but again a motor-sail. We can’t wait until we round the island chains and start heading south again. These eastern routes with eastern trade winds force us to motor constantly!
On the charts, Cayo Obispo and Fajardo look like adorable little places. There is an arial photo of the area and it looks very picturesque. And Fajardo has the largest West Marine in Puerto Rico so we figured it’d be a big city. Reality is another thing. It was dirty, run down … and they must have been hit by a hurricane recently because I’ve never seen so many wrecked vessels … and some of them were large ships.
We anchored just off Cayo Obispo and once we were settled, we took the dinghy to the marina. The marina has a ferry that runs from Cayo Obispo to Fajardo. It costs $5/person to leave the dinghy at the marina and take the ferry to town (return fare).
Once in town … another disappointment. There is a huge ferry terminal, with ferries that go to the Spanish Virgin Islands, etc. BUT … that’s all that was there. We had figured the waterfront would have little shops, restaurants, etc to attract the tourists from the ferries. Nope, notta! There is supposed to be an actual “town” someplace but they wanted $10 for the taxi. We’re too cheap so headed back to the boat.
Once we were back on Soulmatie, I was uncomfortable with how close we’d anchored to the shallows. When we anchored, you couldn’t see the shoal. Now that the tide has dropped, there were rocks above the water … only about 30ft from our boat. Combine this with the fact that there was a beautiful island offshore about 3.5 miles that was calling to me … and it didn’t take much to convince me to leave this place.
We left Cayo Obispo about 2 pm and were nicely moored at Isle De Palominos by 3pm. The Department of Nature Resources has installed mooring balls at a lot of the places. Here, they had MANY and they’re no charge. We gladly took a mooring ball instead of trying to anchor in 30+ ft. of water.
Wow, what a difference! We were finally in clear water! This place was great! And we weren’t the only ones to think so. If you’ve ever done Peanut Island in Palm Beach or Boca Lake in Boca Raton … or the many other places along the Florida Coast, you would feel like you were back home. EVERYONE with access to a boat headed from the east coast of PR to this place on the weekends! It was completely packed. You could barely get to the beach because the entire coastline was lined with powerboats. They use two anchors. One off the bow … then they back down towards shore and bury another anchor right up on the beach. This keeps them only a few feet from shore. And the boats were almost touching, they were so close! The only difference between this place and say Boca Lake is that those few individuals that feel a need to blare their music so loud that everyone on the entire island can here it, blared Spanish music instead of some annoying rap music like back home. Annoying still but much nicer.
We sat and watched the sun set as the parade of boats headed back to the mainland. Surprisingly though, there were quite a few that spent the night.
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