After getting help from the friendly president of the marina in Puerto Real with getting a taxi, we could reach a supermarket at the outskirts of Puerto Real and could buy all the food we wanted for our sail to Cuba.

What we see here again, is that the local supermarkets, of which we went into 4 – 5 only in Puerto Real,, almost only sell canned, packed, ready to warm up US food but no good diary products, no fresh fruits of vegetables, no fresh meat and especially no fresh fish. Reading a bit what it is in this food, I’m not surprised that here very many, if not most of all people, appear to suffer from obesity in various grades; even children appear like this.

After returning to our boat, S worked on the food he wanted to prepare for our non-stop sail to Cuba and I prepared MaRe for departure. At 1530, we lifted the hook and went to the fuel station, which I called before to inform them that we are coming in now.

A French-Canadian sailor left his boat and came to take our line and fixed it far in front of MaRe’s bows. Excellent. With this line and the wind from ahead she softly snuggled on to the pier.

While 184 l of diesel ran in her fuel tank, another sailor came along and introduced himself as the owner and skipper of the P445 we saw immediately when we dropped the hook yesterday. She is 2 years younger than our MaRe. We had a little chat about our boats and then we took off. By then it was 1630. Only 30 min later than we planned.

While carefully getting into open water, we use the engines to safely move around shallow areas and other obstacles and S used the running engines to prepare rice in our 炊飯器, our Japanese rice cooker on board. As the wind blew from the right direction we pulled out the genoa and sailed, while still using the engines, with around 7 kn. After an early dinner – we had no lunch – we reach the WPT, which allowed us to set sails for Cabo Engano, the NE corner of Dominican Republic.

We were damned lucky, the wind came almost exactly from 180 deg. Thus, we set a butterfly configuration with the genoa and the 20 m2 jib. Wind vane setting 179 deg PRT. With this setting and winds around SE to SSE blowing with 4 – 5 Bft, we are moving with around 6 on towards the NE corner of the Dominican Republic. Cuba, we are coming¡