The Cubans are poorer then we are in terms of money but the are richer then we are in terms of time taking for each other and caring for each other.

Victor, our caretaker of the whole day picked us up as agreed at 0900 and drove us to Santa Lucia. On our way we saw, coming from rich countries, shocking things and also very positive things. I had problems to take pictures because I was too occupied with absorbing all the things I saw out of the car window.

Victor, bought a SIM card for me. Thus, now I have a Cuban phone number. It took Victor about 2 hours during which we walked and looked around at the little marketplace and also in the side streets.

What we saw, is currently a bit difficult for me to write about. I need time to deal with all the impressions of the day. It was a time shift back into our childhood in Japan and Germany, when people did not need money to talk and have a good time with each other. There is no treadmill like in our countries.

I’ll write again on Cuba because I’ll be here for almost a month. Tomorrow we set sails for Havana.

Since about 1030 we are docked in the Marina Gaviota, Puerto de Vita, Cuba.

I feel it is not easy for me to describe the positive experiences we had today. I’ll try to sketch it a little bit.

It started while carefully following the well indicate waterway in the long and narrow bay, where the marina is located in a side arm, completely framed in mangroves. I suddenly recognized that there is no garbage to be seen at all. No plastic floats in the water or got stuck at the mangroves trees or drifted by the wind to the many small sandy beaches.

When we called the marina on Ch 16, we got an immediate response. Additionally a guy came in a motorboat to us and ask us to drop the anchor just outside the marina and please wait until the doctor comes on board to check our health situation. (It needs to be said that there is neither an antigen test nor a PCR test needed to enter Cuba. Only three vaccinations must be proofed.) Waiting in such a position for a health check is nothing special because we are international sailors arriving from another country and want and need to make inbound clearance. Puerto de Vita is the Port of Entry in the NE.

About 5 min later we were called on the VHF and asked to come into the marina; we will be advised on where to dock. We followed the request and a gentleman in a white doctor’s coat indicated us where to dock and gave us a hand with the lines. We docked with our PRT side.

The gentleman introduced himself as the doctor, who will do the health related clearance. We all took place in the cockpit and he did what needed to be done. This included a check of our vaccination certificates etc, etc. The most important thing for us was the very friendly atmosphere in which he did his job. We all had an interesting conversation even on personal matters.

When he left, he took our passports with him to give them to the harbor master. Later we understood that a few document were already filled in with information from the passports.

Next came a full crew. Harbor master, border control, customs, and a dog. As Cuba lies on one of the highways for drugs to the USA – the US citizen are simply in so much need of drugs to stand their daily lives – a dog to sniff drugs did but surprised me. The dog was the first guest on board. Looking at him, he gave me the impression, he is already bored as he knows there are no drugs on our boat. A quick bored walk through all the rooms and we were “drug cleared”. Then 2 officers had a look through our boat, opened her and there a door of a cabinet. After 3 min the first one greeted us again friendly and wished us a good time in Cuba. The other one, from border control/immigration helped us to fill in a 4 page document. Very friendly and very helpful when we explained the situation and what to fill in.

I needed to smile when he looked at my 4-color FMB pen. I got the feeling that he would like to have it. So I put it into the pocket of his shirt and he smiled very happy.

OBM, I need some more FMB 4-color pens!!!

He did a good job, was friendly, like we were, thus we all had a pleasant time.

Stressless inbound clearance without not really functioning special apps or homepage to be filled and getting wrongly analyzed by poorly working AI in situations, where we don’t have good internet or no internet connection at all.

We got our visa for 30 days and the permission to sail in Cuban waters. What else do we need?!

Next we know we need to go to the marina office. We established already via email a good contact with Yaney, the lady in the office. She came to our boat shortly after the doctor left and introduce herself. It is just pleasant, to meet and talked with this lady. When we walked up to her office at the top of the little hill, she was in the restaurant to stand some things there. As the wind flows through the 2 1/2 sides open construction, it feels cool sitting there under the reed covered roof. She took the document she already filled in with all the information I sent by email. Explanations for all things we wanted or needed to know mixed with a lot of stories and jokes. We learned we need to go by car Santa Lucia to buy food and get a SIM card for Cuba. Then she introduced us the driver, who will bring us there and back to the marina. Assuming that we are interested about his car he invited us to have look at Today only so much that I was shocked about what car he has. He even opened the engines bay lid and I was even shocked more. This part of today’s experience tomorrow, after we had a ride in this incredible vehicle.

Cuban coast is very close by. In about an hour we will turn into the bay of Puerto de Vita where also the marina Gaviota is located. We established a very good contact with the marina staff. Responsive. Friendly. Informative.

We just watched a fishing boat not far away from us. Two men are sitting under a sun cover. One of them is rowing. Sh said “The Children Of The Old Man And The Sea”. A letter good description of what we saw. The words are meant positively. I’m sure they catch enough fish to make a living. No overfishing. No pollution of the sea by oil.

We are very curious about a few things. How many people appearing to have obesity? How do shops for daily needs look like? Where is the food made sold in these shops? What is our impression of the people we see in their daily life?

Early in the morning, just before 0700, we set the gennaker because the wind was only 3 – 4 Bft. It turned out that this was the wind all day long. The gennaker well trimmed we made almost 5 kn in average. With almost no swell and the wind waves around 50 cm, heading NE, away from the no wind area, was a comfortable sailing.

At 1800 when we prepared for the night, we have winds of 4 and sometimes 5 Bft. Using again a butterfly was not possible because going to our next WPT lead to an AWA of 140 deg. Additionally wanted to arrive at this WPT at the right time to enter the long and narrow waterway to the marina at daylight.

With wind increasing then to constant 5Bft we reached the traffic separation scheme NE of Cabo Lucrecia at midnight and would have been too early at our WPT. Therefore we reefed the genoa to slow down from averaged 5.3 KN to 4.0 KN, which bright us an arrival time at the WPT so we could enter the narrow waterway at sirens 0700.

As for non sailing activities during the day it was reading and writing and I did some administrative work. We squall tried to catch a marlin, starting in the early morning but the thing we caught was a wisp of saragossum gras. No fish today. The wind and the temperature made sitting in the cockpit very pleasant this ourv after-meal-convetsations were pretty long and pretty interesting.

After motoring for 27 h the wind improved enough for sailing.

We are not yet moving fast through the water but the sound of the water streaming along MaRe’s hulls and the sound of the wake at her sterns is just great. It’s silence broken by this gentle and peaceful sounds.

Please keep fingers crossed that we still get a bit more wine from ESE

In a few hours we are crossing the traffic separation scheme at Cuba’s eastern coast and I expect a lot of crossing traffic. Although it will be daylight by then, we might use radar to have information on CPA (closest point of approach) and TCPA (time to CPA). There is even another traffic separation scheme about 100 NM ahead of us, which will lead to another increase of traffic.

Right now, we have 2 vessels on our radar screen; both are still about 12 NM away from us.

To make sure that we look every 15 min on the radar screen, we use an alarm every 15 min. Normal cargo ships and cruise ships sail with about 10 – 20 kn. Thus they can shorten the distance to MaRe by about 3 – 6 NM during 15 min.

Last night was a workless one. The only thing to do was checking the radar screen every 15 min to see ships before we hit them or they hit us. Additionally, the most difficult task was not to fall asleep. I wrote a bunch of messages and emails, which will be sent once I have internet connection again.

As for AIS, the real professional ships all have to use and use AIS; a VHF based Automatic Identification System. Also fishing boats have to use them. But how can one expect a small fishing boat with one of two persons on board to have an AIS transponder installed on his little boat? Think about Hemingway’s “The old man and the sea”. These are the ones for which we need to watch radar.

For sailing boats, like our nutshell it is a voluntary installation. We have it on board. This sees AIS signals of other boats and sends out our signal.

But back to the activities to be done on board.

As we have to use the engines to move out of the calm, there is no sail work to be done at all. When sailing there is always such work to be done. Changing and adjusting sails to the always actual situation. This can be quite some work. Then comes all the other work which needs to be done.

There is beside pantry work – on this sail done by Shi, my Japanese friend – a lot of administration work needs to be done. As we live in the internet age all administrative organizations around the world, assume that all boats have full and fast internet access, thus all needs to be done via the internet in advance. Eg. Getting permission to enter a country from the normal legal side and with COVID-19 it is even more cumbersome. Then, also more mails and messages to companies, friends and family need to be written even if they go out only a few days later. Narrations, like this one, log book entries, diary entries, etc needs to be written as well.

And then, there is the boat with all the little and big things to be maintained, improved or repaired. Fishing equipment is also one of these things. Fishing requires also time. Getting the right lure on the line, getting the lure out at the right length of 100 to 150 m. Hauling the catch in can take some time and physical effort, To eviscerated the fish takes time and the workplace needs to be cleaned with plenty of buckets of water and a brush. On this sail, so far we only caught 2 barracudas. As they can be poisonous it was easy; just getting them off of the hook and back into the sea.

On top of all there is so much to be talked about and this requires a lot of time especially after the meals….

And, and, and, the conclusion is, that living on a boat keeps you busy that there is no time to get rusty.

Yesterday, late afternoon we started the Genset to make water. 2 h resulted in 360 l of fresh water of excellent quality. The same as in the bottled water sold here. Here it’s called “purified water”and on the bottle is stated that it’s made by “reverse osmosis”. This is the same way our water maker works. As Sh also needed the rice cooker, were kept it running for a bit more and heated the boiler. The hot shower in the evening felt very good.

During the night rain clouds chased us. Each cloud has its own wind system. When cloud has finished to drop its rain on us, the wind stalls and changes directions. After 1 -2 h we had such a strong windshift that we shifted the jib to the same side as the genoa. It gave us more flexibility in wind directions. We still made 5 – 6 kn.

We had a long breakfast in a very nice atmosphere in the cockpit. Warm air, not hot. Wind flashes the air in the cockpit permanently. This made us relaxing. We are cruising, not racing! While talking the wind slowly but steadily went down. Finally we moved and replaced the two head sails with the gennaker. The wind went down to almost zero before it increased and we ran around 7 kn with the gennaker.

At 16 kn TWS we replaced it by the genoa-jib butterfly. Steering with wind vane (WV) mode we will turn NW with the wind coming more from S. With this configuration we are running already since quite a while.

The coast line with a higher mountain range passes in a distance of about 10 – 15 NM at STB. Different shades of grey indicate that the mountains are not all in one line. Letting the eyes move from abeam at STB to the stern and to abeam PRT, the water looks incredible blue. The white crests are perfectly matching contrast to the deep blue. The swell rolls onto MaRe from about 160 deg PRT; it reaches almost 100 m between 2 waves. And when the high ones, with some 2 – 3 m, roll on, one can think that they will come into MaRe’s cockpit. However, MaRe lifts her bumps and let’s the wave pass under her hulls. Sometimes she makes an attempt to surf the wave down. But she knows how to behave and doesn’t surf.

What will the wind do with the three of us, MaRe, Sh, and me in the 24 – 48 h?

Just before sunset I checked again the potential to change to a butterfly configuration and finally it was good enough.

We put the main down, set the genoa on PRT and the jib at STB. Carefully adjusting the AWA for the wind vane mode, to 163 deg S, we saw that we can reach out WPT Cabo Tres Arramas with this butterfly configuration. Great! If we are very lucky and the wind remains stable, we even can sail farther.

Now I download the latest weather forecast. SHOCK! By tomorrow noon, a huge calm is forecasted between the NW area of the Dom Rep and Cuba. No reasonable way around. Can we hope that 4 weather models are so wrong? I’m afraid not. Thus let’s see how bad it will turn out. We can’t change it, so we will make the best of of it.

But until then we enjoy the butterfly sailing

Last night we experienced this again.

Until about 2200 sailing was just fun with the butterfly configuration. The track was about 10 deg north of the planned route. No problem because we will get a situation where we can correct the deviation.

Then the wind got weak and changed direction up N. We had no choice but stopped the butterfly configuration, which was so fast – with the right wind!

Sailing only with the genoa would have been a bit slow. Thus, we hoisted the main extremely safe. Only reef 2 where there was enough reserve even for reef 1. Then the wind was on again. For quite a while the wind angle of the wind vane mode needed to be adjusted frequently. And a next step the sail trim was often needed. At the end the wind speed increased, direction stayed pretty constant, and we sailed for a few hours at a nice speed through the night.

Dawn and sunrise were as (almost) always magnificent. As there are many words in Japanese for “dawn” and “sunrise”, Sh and I had an interesting discussion on the meaning of the various words.

As we will still sail all day long about the same course, we took the fishing gear out. Like during the Atlantic crossing, we used the lure, which was supposed to catch tuna, but got us dolphinfishes.. Let’s see if a fish gets on the hook.

Breakfast is done.

Towards noon their was a bite at the bait. A 50 cm barracuda. As barracudas can be poisonous in the Caribbean, it went back into the sea.

About 2 h later another fish was on the hook. It felt pretty big but could get off of the hook.

We will see when there is another bite on the bait

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¡