We are in Puerto Rico.

 

We made it in 31 hours, it should have taken us 25. Four boats left Samana Dominican Republic at 10am for Puerto Rico after having many meetings about when we were leaving and weather conditions. Everything looked great on the Saturday morning of our crossing. This water is called the Mona Passage and it is known for being a nasty passage.  To check the weather we have many ways to cross reference with all our information. I use Windfinder another boat uses Passage Weather and another uses Chris Parker. He is a weather man you can listen to on the single side band radio and you can also prescribe be email and get personnel weather reports. All the weather reports were the same, winds from the east 10 knots gusting to 12 and waves from the north east 3 feet 8 seconds apart. This would make a good crossing, not the best but good. Well all of them were wrong! After leaving at 10 am winds were around 10 knots and waves were very small in the Samana Bay. Around 12 the winds picked up and kept building until they got to 18 and 20. So know the waves start to build. Finally the waves were 3 to 4 feet and 3 seconds apart all the way. We all decided to go along the shore and use the east winds as long as we could then turn into them hoping they would die down by midnight. This didn't happen and we had to turn east into the wind. This is a tricky crossing because there is a shoal half way across called the hour class shoal. This shoal is about 100 feet deep and it doesn't seem like it could be a problem but there is a current that runs into this shoal from 1000 feet deep. The water will rush upwards and cause a washing mashing effect. If you go through this shoal you can find waves coming at you from all directions. It's wise to stay clear of this area. Beating into the waves is very hard. It slows you down by 3 or 4 knots so instead of 6 or 7 knots your doing 3 to 5 knots which means you arrive a lot later that you want to. You want to arrive before 4 pm because the thunder storms start building on the north side of Puerto Rico and then move across the Mona Passage. We all thought that we should be going a little fast than we thought. We were doing 1 and 2 knots. That makes for a long passage. We found there was a lot of currents going through this area and we were told that but we hoped they would have been in our favor. We are all very tired and glad we made it safely. Tomorrow we will check in with customs and move on down the coast.