Turks and Caicos

Saturday, March 4, 2006
N 21 degrees 05.41 minutes
W 072 degrees 00.11 minutes

Happy Birthday, Doug.

We passed Turks and Caicos last night (and smelled its burning trash), on our way to the Dominican Republic. We are currently less than 100 miles from the town of Luperon, hoping to get there at about 7AM tomorrow. We do not have a DR flag yet (a vessel is required to fly the flag of its host country), but we do have our Red Sox flag ready to go, so that should get us some leeway. Perhaps Big Papi is there now!

The wind has been light and the seas are very calm, which makes for a comfortable passage, but we have had to motor a great deal. Fortunately, we are able to carry a lot of fuel, and we filled up in George Town.

We've been out of communication for a while, as Mayaguana had no working payphones and Conception had no phones (or people) at all.

We are traveling with two other sailboats, Amanzi and Savvy. John on Savvy is singlehanding, but he has set up his cockpit so he is very comfortable on long passages. With his autohelm steering and the other boats on watch, he is able to get some sleep without much concern for running into anything or going off course.

The Silver Banks is an area of shallower water located east of Turks and Caicos. It's the tropical version of New England's Stellwagen, and all the humpback whales one sees off Cape Cod in the summer sensibly travel south for the winter and to the Silver Banks in the spring to mate. We won't be getting very close to the banks, but we did see three humpback whales treaveling at the surface just after we left Mayaguana.

------------------------------
Sent via PocketMail
Email Anywhere
www.pocketmail.com