Marco Polo by Tony Armit

Author:Tony Armit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shadow Press
Published: 2022-08-29T02:03:36+00:00

Puerto Rico & Dominican Republic

‘Bon Voyage, Marco Polo,’ came a voice through a loud hailer on shore, as we slipped the mooring at Charlotte Amelie, St Thomas, waved our farewells, motored out and hoisted sail in drizzly rain. We set a course inside Sail Rock for Culebra Island.

Culebra looked interesting – its rolling hills were dotted with red and yellow huts, and there was a bay full of candy-striped buoys – but there was no shelter, so we gybed and headed for Puerto Rico, which by now was just showing through the evening dusk.

There was continual air traffic overhead until just after dark, and masses of lights shone out from the Puerto Rican shore. Our charts were not up to date or detailed in this area, so we kept well out from Calebra’s rocky, reef-strewn shore, and later discovered that the island was a military zone where anchorage was prohibited. A good thing we’d kept going!

At 1.30 a.m., we lowered the main to slow us down and caught up on sleep, undertaking two-hour watches. The San Juan light beamed out bright and clear, along with a lot of others that weren’t marked on our old map. At dawn, we followed a dawdling little coastal ship into Bahía de San Juan – San Juan Bay.

From 8.00 a.m. the air traffic recommenced. Planes of all shapes, sizes and noise levels obliterated the quiet morning silence we’d become accustomed to on our voyage. One aircraft was shaped like a huge cigar, with three propellers on the aft side of each wing. It seemed to just fly around and around the island, drowning out all other sounds with each pass.

Buildings, cars, buses, houses and all the signs of a large city were soon obvious. Wow, this place was as big as Cape Town!

Around a headland, we passed an old stone fort, and entered a long line of buoys that marked the harbour’s channels. A big freighter swept by, waltzed around the buoys, then away down the bay. We followed, slogging in the dirty, muddy, smelly water but ended up in the wrong place. We hailed a fisherman, not expecting to be answered in English. He replied in American, ‘You’re in the wrong channel.’ He pointed us in the direction of a much narrower channel, where a forest of flags – dominated by the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Puerto Rico – marked the location of the Club Nautico.

We found ourselves in the yacht club’s marina, surrounded by very flash game fishing boats, and were invited to tie up to the jetty right in front of the three-level clubhouse alongside Thunderbird – a large (compared to Marco) gaff-rigged ketch (probably the same Colin Archer design as Jack Earl’s Kathleen Gillett). Thunderbird was solid, and rigged, as they say, for the North Sea – or, in this case, the waters of Alaska – with a 13-foot (four-metre) bowsprit. Her owners were Canadian – a husband and wife named Dick and Trudi Seaborg who soon became our hosts, entertainers, guides and lovely friends.

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