Waiting to cross

Luperon lies some 80 or so nautical mile SSE of Big Sand Cay, where we now wait. Yesterday, we, along with 4 other boats, left our T&C anchorages to make our way here, staging to depart later today for the DR.

There are times when you just shouldn’t trust the chartplotter!

As I write this, two power boats, filled with tourists, just arrived here disturbing our idyllic little sanctuary. Such is the weekend! The trip that took our boats all day yesterday to make probably only took these guys about 45 minutes.

Today will largely be spent relaxing as our trip to Luperon will take place overnight. Originally we planned to leave here around dinner time to make landfall tomorrow morning, late enough that there will be good light to enter the harbor but early enough that the trade winds will have not yet increased to their full daytime velocities. Our departure has now been moved ahead to 2:30 PM. Why you ask?

On the nose!

How long will the trip take? A re-read of this post will show how difficult that is to determine with any real accuracy. We first based our calculations on a speed of 5 knots but now that the wind is going to be close to our course line as opposed to the NNE that was originally predicted, we changed our estimate to allow for only 4.5 knots of speed. If we’re making much better speed, we can always reef the sails to slow down.