Luperon, Dominican Republic (continuation of 4/13/2013)

Hi all … you may remember from our last write-up, we had been feeling a little under the weather.  Larry talking to Lynn (the lady who had taken us on the adventure ride to Puerto Plata) and he told her we weren’t feeling well.  She summed it up perfectly (and in the lady-like manner I would expect from Lynn).  “Oh, you got the shits”.  She knew exactly what was wrong so, I guess this is typical for this area!

Well, we thought we were getting better so we hauled anchor and started heading out about 5pm.  The author of that stupid book (that isn’t even worth mentioning the name of) said he’s seen a lot of people get “stuck” in Luperon because they check out the weather in the harbor and since the winds blow thru there so strongly, they think, Hell No … I won’t go!  Meanwhile, out in the open waters, it is much more pleasant than at anchor and they’ve  missed their weather window!  So … you would think we have learned not to trust what we read in his book but … NO … we go ahead and leave, believing since it’s not too bad at anchor, it’ll be quite nice once we’re out there.  WRONG!!!!  We exited the harbor with about 20 knots of wind and as soon as we were in open water, we hit a steady gail in excess of 40 knots!  Holy Crap!!!

There’s something about leaving and then returning to the harbor that is hard to swallow.  Maybe it’s ego and admitting we made a mistake?  Maybe it’s the fear that we may never leave again if we return?  But whatever it was, it was strong enough to make us chose to endure gale force winds instead of retreating!  And in retrospect, we are glad we did.  It got us going and on our way to better places!

We sailed through the night and the winds finally calmed.  It was actually quite nice to know how our boat (and crew) handles gale force winds.  Given the direction of the wind/waves, we faired very well.  It was by no means comfortable, but we made it the 50 miles to the next anchorage with very few issues (except exhaustion).