The cultural museum in Santiago, DR.

We arrived in   Luperon on Sunday afternoon in jubilant mood having enjoyed a very smooth three day passage from Jost Van Dyke, BVI. The passage had a little drama to keep us engaged, with bad fuel killing the engine on Saturday afternoon just shy of Puerto Escondido. I got down below with a bucket and a tin of coke, it’s funny how a coke placebo still soothes my stomach when feeling queasy, and set to work changing the two filters. Fuel filters in boat have a dual purpose, removing any particle contaminants as well as separating any water in the fuel preventing it from getting to the engine. Despite having changed our primary filter before leaving Puerto Rico, there was considerable buildup in the bowl.

Changing the secondary filter, or more specifically bleeding air from the fuel line after changing is difficult on the Perkins, they’re renowned for hiding little pockets of air in their pants that takes hours of work to expel. So I got the shop manual out to keep me right and after about 90 minutes had the job complete. Time to start the engine to prove my competence.

A beautiful church on the way to El Castillio, DR.

Starting the engine is a little bit of fun these days too. One might conclude that I’ve been neglecting our precious diesel. In Puerto Rico our starter motor threw its toys from the pram, and would only cooperate if we were extra nice. When supplied with clean fuel the Perkins normally fires up first time, ‘on the button’ one might say. Now it could take us anything up to a minute of key turning back and forth just to get the starter to engage the engine, although once it cranked the motor picked up quickly. I knew that Nigel would know what was wrong, but with parental arrivals and Padi dive courses in the schedule we opted to pamper the old girl and deal with it later.

In Jost Van Dyke it gave up for the last time. Dear Nigel was of course my oracle. Even if you don’t own a boat, or even don’t care about engines or electricals a little bit of Boatowners’ Mechanical and Electrical manual might just change your life! A quick work through his troubleshooting guide, jam a screwdriver in the right place and whoosh.. we’re back in business. So for the last two weeks we’ve been melting our screwdriver – literally – shorting the solenoid to fire it up. Nigel says it must be the points, that’s fixable, we’ll just need to find the parts.

So back to the fuel filters… Kel turned the key, I shorted the solenoid and we were back in business. It takes about 10 minutes for my faith in my own ability to come up to temperature, but after 15 she was still alive. Good work.

We stopped in Puerto Escondido at 2pm and got the anchor down. On our passage east in May we stopped at this beautiful deserted anchorage for a swim and a wash before crossing the Mona Passage. It was all about rest, relaxation, hygiene..

Anchor up at 6pm and on to Luperon with the wind in our sails we were feeling very relaxed and excited about arriving in the early morning, catching up with friends and settling down for a few months of earning money and developing the boat. In the early hours the morning the wind dropped and we turned on the motor to keep our speed up. At about 6am it all went to shit.

The engine died again, nightmare. I woke Kel from her sleep and climbed back into the engine bay. After two hours I wasn’t getting anywhere and we were getting pretty close to Luperon so we decided we would fix the problem when we arrived. With our drifter flying our boat speed had picked up to 6 knots and by noon we were within sight of the entrance to the bay. Without an engine though we would struggle to manouvre in the anchorage if there wasn’t much space, so we launched the dinghy from the bow, put the outboard on the back and lashed it to the side of the boat. I then jumped in and fired up the motor, assisting Kel entering the channel.

There’s nothing like having friends around to lend a hand, and having hailed them on the radio a couple of hours out, Brian and Alicia of Sarabande motored out in their dinghy to give us a little extra muscle. Alicia hopped into our dinghy taking over power duties while I went to the bow to prepare the anchor. Brian roamed in Sarabande’s tender nudging our bow to get us through the wind, and pulling our stern as we set the anchor.

Beannacht at anchor in Luperon, DR.

Anchor down, drama over. Within 10 minutes we were standing on P’tit Louis with a host of friends..Luc, Olivier and Natalie, Karmen and Tom, Alicia and Brian, Mike and Alyssa.. We couldn’t have imagined a more encouraging and supportive bunch welcoming us in our return to Luperon. We feel very fortunate and much more excited than we imagined we ever could about spending the next 5 months in a bay so filled with 1s and 2s that we can’t swim off the boat.

The last week has been a blur of activity. I started working in Luc’s factory the day after we arrived. Our friend Andrew from Vancouver was with us and was an excellent guest, tolerating everything from a lack of shower onboard to Anzuelo pissing on his bed (this is one jealous cat). Kel left for Panama yesterday to start her delivery from there to New York. We’ve partyed in Luc’s house twice… It’s really fun to have a social life again.

So blogging in Luperon will look a little different, with an absense of beach side photos and fish hunting tales to recount. But I expect a few interesting things to happen in the time that we’re here so we’ll try to keep on top of it and make it fun.