Stu and Dave 'surfing' in the harbour

Bloody awful is the only way to describe Bryan Habana’s showing at the weekend. His mustache I mean, though his rugby talents weren’t nearly as prominent as that rat hanging below his nose. Add the entire Aussie team in and you’ve got a full display of bad facial hair. November, as I prefer to remember it, capped an excellent year for Irish rugby, played 11, won 10, drew 1. Kel and I listened online at the weekend and then caught the highlights on iPlayer, four seconds at a time. Sadly the internet in Luperon is pretty patchy.

The end of Movember marks a significant milestone for us, our first year on the water! You may have noticed a few updates on the blog recently, some design modifications and the addition of a Google maps image of our trip here, and here. I’ve really enjoying going through our ship’s log, which my captain faithfully completes (up to the BVIs anyhow), reflecting on our progress so far, remembering friends on land and sea along the way. You can check our progress to date, which today is all the way to West Palm Beach. Soon I’ll have got us all the way to Luperon and it’ll be ‘live’ from then on.

We’re grateful for the generosity of others that’s carried us through thus far. We started out with a small, but we thought sufficient amount of money to get through the year, and very quickly realised how expensive this sailing lark can be. Friends and acquaintances have stuck their necks out along the way to help us solve problems with gaffer tape and hose clamps, or just fed us when we were low on morale.

Morale has been a little low of late. Luperon has become a fairly depressing place, and one that we and our friends are keen to get out of. Last time I wrote about the corrupt officials, which is a pain in the ass, but the truly depressing aspects of life here are much more related to sex work and alcohol. Two weeks ago I was sitting in one of the two gringo bars in town, Shaggy’s, and overheard a hideous, and yet so typical conversation. I’ll disguise the names for the sake of confidentiality:

Gregorio was talking with Jimmyorio about the recent visit of his girlfriend’s (read sex worker’s) fourteen year old nephew to Luperon. He came for the weekend, and was excited to visit Luperon as he had never been here, and also to stay on a boat. The three of them were out in a local Dominican bar restaurant where the ladies of the night, and morning and afternoon, meet clients. Gregorio’s girlfriend disappears for a few minutes and comes back with a lady for her nephew and the two of them disappear for the evening. Sentences like “I just had so much respect for her” and “ I mean, imagine if your aunt bought you a piece of ass when you were 14” were among the most notable. Auntie Jacqui did bust out a few tricks that mum doesn’t need to know about, but buying ass was not on the list.

These guys are hanging out on the edge of reality, dying to believe their allure lies anywhere but their wallets. Mum just emailed having returned from Thailand, sorry Padraig Thy-land, and it sounds like a very parallel culture. The girls in town are astute, and sadly realise that the gringos present them with a much more lucrative revenue stream than any jobs in the area. And judging by the physical condition of the average gringo, and the recommended daily alcohol consumption in Luperon, they aren’t troubled too often to maintain their half of the contribution. Quite a few gringos who’ve been in Luperon harbour for more than a season have developed considerable alcohol problems, two I’ve met have severe liver problems and are off booze altogether, its a dead end town for some people, particularly older men.

The most damaging aspect of this gringo intervention is how Dominican men view their women. The prostitution that is essentially encouraged and facilitated by society as money makes its way to the families of the women overtly or through unspoken transactions. At the same time the women are dismissed as whores. It is not uncommon for Dominican men to have multiple girlfriends simultaneously, and to make no effort to hide it, resulting in an instability in relationships that women respond to by putting their wares on display to provide for themselves. Prostitution is perhaps too strong a word for what occurs among Dominicans, but it is certainly trading ass-ets.

Of course I wouldn’t want to comment on all this sexual activity without sampling it myself! Not quite, but a funny occurrence none the less. I’ve had a couple of humorous mix ups with my friend Moreno who works at the factory, one of which occurred recently and was reminded of as we went out to dinner with Yasmin and her family in Las Maras, a few miles outside of Luperon. Moreno and I communicate in pigeon Spanish often, and for a while I really felt like I was making progress. When Moreno invited me to attend his graduation ceremony for the George Washington school of English as he was being presented with a certificate I of course obliged, very happy to be included. I arrived at the prearranged time only to discover that I was actually the equivalent of a prom date for his 15 year old friend. We paraded up the street arm in arm captured on videos and cameras throughout the town, and I got on stage with Yasmin for a photo when she was presented with her certificate.

On Saturday night we were treated to dinner with Yasmin’s extended family from gran to cousins. They were fantastically hospitable, a big spread of pollo, papas fritas, huevos, kayote, berejenas, zanahoria, cerveza, jugo de chinola (check out Google Translate if you’re lost). We were totally stuffed. The whole evening proceeded in limited Spanish, Keli’s capacity being vastly superior to mine, and we took our photo album to show them some images of us from Ireland and Canada. Next year we’ll come back so that I can take Yasmin as my second wife. And sometime shortly after I predict that I will magically become a eunuch.

In a bid to lift the mood in Luperon Dave and I got the surfboard out a few days ago and tried some watersurfing, or is it surfskiing off the back of the dinghy. We had a laugh cruising round the anchorage and waking the boats nearby. It was great to get physical again in the water. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that that water is full of 18,000 people’s excrement on outgoing tides, and just to confirm that there are indeed fertile organisms in there I had a headache for three days and felt like my sinus’ were exploding. Some good bugs got flushed up there when I wiped out. We’ll get out there again though, it made me pine for clear waters again.

Today we celebrated Karmen’s birthday! First mate, cook and Captain Fun on Ellida, Karmen’s been an excellent friend to us since we first met in Georgetown, and pancake breakfast was a good way to usher in the day. Ellida are probably heading out of Luperon a little ahead of us, but we’re really excited about catching them further down the chain. We may indeed coordinate a passage to Hawaii at some stage. It’s not written in to Plan A yet, but in sailing we learn that an alphabet of plans can be overwritten with the slightest change in circumstance.

Dave and Danielle have been performing some heroic feats aboard Beannacht of late. Danielle and Keli have spent many hours in front of the sewing machine working on our dinghy cover and some dresses for Kel. Dave and I checked the alignment of our engine and transmission, and adjusted our PSS drip-less shaft seal. They’re also headed for St Maarten, hopefully ahead of us, and we’re excited about hanging out with them in future.

Muma - the town goat.

So this week we’re changing gear. It’s 25 days till Keli’s birthday, 26 till Christmas, and we’re injecting some urgency into our game. We’ve made some real improvements to the boat while in Luperon, not least by the efforts of Dennis and Pat during their visit, but it’s time to finish the projects that are open and postpone the rest for the New Year. I’ve a little more work to do for Lucas at the factory, but ideally we’ll leave Luperon before Christmas and make our way to St Maarten.

And that’s about it for now.

Some moody skies over Luperon

Second coffee of the day,  just sitting in Capitan Steve’s place ruminating on what has been an amusing two months in Luperon since our return. Actually I’m punching the keys of my new Asus EeePC netbook which is proving to be a fantastic investment, super-portable for the pocket, no more fighting over which movie to watch, and we’ve got a dedicated Windows machine to run our navigation and communications software on that doesn’t pollute our beautiful Macbook. Sadly the Macbook’s beauty is beginning to fade after just 12 months, grey screens every other day, arrow keys that don’t work, and a few bruises here and there. It seems that $2000 laptops do not belong on sailboats regardless of how pretty they are.

For the last week we’ve been partying like it’s our last night in town because several of our friends in the harbour are getting ready to move on at the first opportunity. That looked like it was opening up 10 days ago, and then every day since there’s been another squall line coming through, or a northerly swell, keeping people in port. I’m starting to feel like I can’t keep up with it… It’s also been great to have Tom from Ellida back, although Karmen doesn’t return for another month, and we’ve picked up some great friends in Dave and Danielle from Azure Mist (aka Loopy), Mark from Opal, and to reconnect with Mark and Karen from Sussura.

Leaving well has definitely been the hardest aspect of our sailing life to come to terms with. On land you concentrate on choosing the date and time, you pack your bags (for us 5 mins before departure) and then jump in the car. We rarely worried about traffic even in Belfast because it’s such a small city. On the water the weather dictates 90% of your decision-making, and the boat makes up about another 5% – some days she just doesn’t want to go, throws a fuel filter at the last minute or you notice a damaged component, and you are reminded that you’re the third in line in this relationship.

Hurricane Bill moving towards us...as Kel was planning her passage north from Panama!

So for the last 10 days we’ve been socialising in the evenings, open mic night in Shaggy’s Bar, sundowners on other boats, sundowners on our boat, karaoke… and during the day we watch people get their boats prepared and do the final fuel and provisioning runs. My musical talents are somewhat stagnant, but these piano lessons will hopefully pick things up a bit Rocket Piano. What’s emotionally difficult is that you can work solidly every day for  a week to be ready, and then when that day arrives your two senior officers (weather and boat) can veto your exit. It’s really hard to stay in a state of readyness without just wanting to get going regardless of conditions.

Alicia's 30th birthday party

Team Sarabande (aka Brian, Alicia, Louis and Stevesy) found themselves in exactly that situation last night. Some of our finest cruising friends, and people we desperately hope to stay intouch with forever, they’ve been working really hard for over a month to leave D.R. bound for the US Virgin islands to pick up some work. Brian and I have a 7am coffee date every day to listen to the weather forecast and talk crap. Last night they came to visit us at bedtime to say goodbye for the last time, due to leave at 3am. I woke up this morning and saw that they hadn’t left in the middle of the night as planned as the boat had taken longer to ready than they’d expected. Good on em I say, it’s so hard emotionally to ‘go back on your word’ once you’ve said your leaving, but it’s considerably worse to head out when you’re not feeling ready and get a hiding. I’m slowly learning to just not say when we’re leaving, until the anchors up and we’re motoring out to sea.

Having fun at the waterfalls.

Another lesson I’m learning is not to have an opinion on where this ship might be going.. not for weather, nor the ship herself, but for the captain who overrules me anyway. Whilst the generic ‘you’ is third in command, the ‘I’ in this case is most definitely fourth! Sailing is slow travel, and cruising even more so. In the last year we’ve had so much fun in places we really didn’t expect it, and little fun in places we had high expectations, so in firming up the plans for the next season of cruising we’re approaching it with new eyes. The first fresh perspective is how fast we like to travel, and contrary to life on land (Kel has now two outstanding speeding tickets in the USA) we like to go slow! So in the spirit of go slow we’ve provisionally reduced the scope of our travel plans for next season to just the south western corner of the Caribbean, Columbia to Guatemala.

We’ve a fresh perspective on the budget too. We’ve both managed to earn some lovely pennies in Luperon that will help us extend our trip for another year. But what we found during this year is that our money tended to vanish when we were near civilisation, or at least Walmart, and didn’t run away too fast when we weren’t. So we’ll avoid Puerto Rico (Walmartville) and we’re giving up the credit cards in lieu of cold hard cash.  We were not only astonished by some of our Visa bills this year, but also screwed by those sharp suited currency traders on a number of occasions, cash just can’t catch you out in the same way.

Anzuelo's still trying hard to be the cutest cat on the block.

Keli spent the month of August in Panama attempting to deliver a boat from Panama to New York for a guy we met through Luc called Alejandro. A charasmatic Spaniard who knew little about sailing, and it became clear later was a little light on the facts about the boat’s condition. She can tell the story for herself, but basically the boat left Panama three weeks behind schedule because Alej was still moving out of his apartment, registering the vessel (that he had owned for a year and that is a legal requirement), fitting an autohelm (that was promised before Kel arrived) and a host of other jobs including moving on a full sized desk! Kel and our good mate Mike from Gaia gave it their best shot but ultimately Sawasawa, a 1976 Del Rey 50, was not seaworthy and they had to pack it in. It’s for sale at the minute, but we’d advise against it even if Alej paid you his asking price to take it!

In Kel’s absence I concentrated on learning some Spanish and work at the factory. We’re still taking lessons, and just last week started meeting with Pierre and Florence from Venus and Natalie from P’tit Louis for 2hrs of Spanish conversation. Today we learnt that insults in Spanish are a little different.. my personal fav was ‘I defecate on your mother, who incidentally was a commercial sex worker, and who birthed you from her bottom’ – nice huh?

Only Brittney elicits this level of passion.

Dennis and Pat arrive this weekend for a two week visit so boat projects are in full swing. I’ve been working on installing the new alternator on the engine and am about half way there on the bracket, with the belt and pulleys to come. We’ve fixed the backstay tensioner – the backstay holds the top of the mast ‘back’, and the tensioner allows us to manually control the tension (this sailing lark aint hard). We modified the storage under the sink to allow for some additional order in the cleaning products department and to keep our ziplock bags in one place – ziplocks might just be my favourite invention. D & P will not only bring us a suitcase or two of goodies, but their arrival prompts us to get the boat ready for sailing and reminds us of the tasks that need to be completed before we leave Luperon. We plan to sail up to Turks and Caicos for a week or so with them and then spend another week traveling in D.R.

We haven’t really got stuck into tourism in the D.R. yet, but we did have an amazing trip to the waterfalls near Luperon when our excellent friend Andrew Iverson was in town. Brian and Alicia (s/v Sarabande) joined us and we hiked up over, under and through 27 waterfalls with our two Dominican guides before turning around at the top and jumping and sliding our way back down. Absolutely invigorating, we’re going to do it again with D & P next week. Other than that we’ve travelled to Santiago and Puerto Plata, two cities about 40 km from Luperon, and spent two nights in Cabarete, a tourist-orientated surf resort down the coast. I did pay $245 RD (about $7 or £4.50) for a can of Guinness when we were there which was more than a little excessive, but it’s been a while and felt worth it.

The Good (read: mad) Ship Brian: he's smokin'

So that’s an update. I’ve got most of October off from the factory which is great. I’m really not at the stage where going back to 40 hrs a week is appealing. We’ll keep at the boat projects this week and then enjoy our time with Kel’s folks before I get back to that. Kel has been teaching Thai massage to a couple of friends in the anchorage two days a week which is cool, and she’s also exploring a couple of options for delivery jobs in the next 6 weeks or so.

She also wanted the world to know that her hair is it’s own natural colour for the first time since 1987.