Greetings from the Dominican Republic!

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Cheers to us! We made it! After 7 weeks in Jamaica and loving every minute of it, we have safely arrived in the Dominican Republic. Specifically, we are in an extremely remote area in the southwest corner of the country called Bahia de las Aguilas. It is absolutely gorgeous! There is one restaurant in the area located 1.5 nautical miles from our boat and is attached to a “glamping” resort in this national park. Despite it’s remoteness, there seems to be a lot to explore.

Apologies that we haven’t been able to upload any videos to share with you all as we haven’t had any decent wifi in months, but boy, do we have stories to tell! We have been dealing with a propulsion issue since arriving in Jamaica on December 24 from picking up a fishing line in our prop. What this amounts to is that, at times, we have been completely engineless. While we have attempted MULTIPLE times to MacGyver everything back together, it has yet again failed us. And this last time was on our passage from Jamaica to the DR on the first night!

While we are a sailboat and wind is our primary propulsion, having an engine is quite nice and helpful in various situations. For those interested in the details, we have a coupler that attaches our electric motor shaft to our boat shaft. This is the piece that has broken, so essentially our shafts are no longer connected. More importantly, other than just not having propulsion, we do not have a way to lock our boat shaft into place and, because it is not connected, it can spin itself out the back of our boat while sailing leaving a 1.5 inch hole in our boat! So yes, we had to MacGyver a way to lock our prop in place using hose clamps, seizing wire, a clam shell zinc, and a filter wrench while underway to the DR.

The sail itself was a challenge. It took 5 days to make 300 good miles. We sailed roughly 450 miles in reality. All of this was done beating into a strong east wind. To round out the experience, we also had hours of being becalmed… just bobbing and drifting in the water due to lack of wind. As Keith loves to remind Becca, it is a beast going east!

Overall, life is good though. If you’re going to be stranded without a motor, at least we have an amazing view and unrivaled waters. The boat is safe and will stay here until she is fixed up again. We will spend the foreseeable days swimming and exploring the area while we attempt to coordinate getting the parts we need shipped to us from the United States. Should be interesting as so far anyone we meet seems puzzled when we ask how to get mail delivered to the area. Looks like we’ll be trekking quite a ways to find a shipping agency/courier! As they say, cruising is just fixing your boat in exotic places. And if you think it takes a village to raise a child, try having a boat. A huge sincere thank you to all of our friends back home assisting in getting us what we need.

Hopefully, we can get ourselves sorted with a SIM card for data and get videos of our adventures uploaded soon using that.

And as always, please send emails with your life updates. We miss you all terribly and truly love staying connected with you all back home.

Much love,

Keith & Becca