The temperature in Dominican Republic now is 32 degrees Celsius. It is hot and humid! The plan is to leave for New York City on Friday. I heard from my weather router, Chris Parker, and Friday is looking good for strong and consistent trade winds to take us north for the three days into our journey home. The plan is to aim for New York City, 1200 nautical miles due north, go up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario, and then sail across Lake Ontario to Toronto.
Neil, Ben, and Steve arrive tomorrow afternoon and we will plan for an early departure on Friday morning. I have provisioned the boat with enough food to last us, unless we catch fish, then we will have too much….. Typically, when I want to shop for food, I hop in the inflatable dinghy and take the wet and windy ride into Samana. It usually takes about 15 minutes directly into the trade winds and I arrive sopping wet. I am usually met by a guy who promises to take care of the dinghy for $5.00 while I am shopping. Today, as I headed off to the market, another man, Samuel, asked if I wanted some free mangos. He took me the other direction, past the harbour to a mango tree. The first part of the process is to climb the mango tree and jump up and down to shake the ripe mangoes on the ground.
Samuel getting ready to climb the mango tree to shake out the ripe mangoes
Once the mangoes hit the ground, Samuel scooped them into the bag for me to bring back to the boat.
We have enough mangoes to feed us through to the winter! If we don’t get through them all, we’ll have to jettison them overboard before we hit the shores of USA. There are stories of sailors bringing back exotic fruits to the land of plenty only to get them confiscated by Customs when are inspected. The Customs officer will charge a fee to destroy the possibly contaminated and dangerous fruits as much as $1000. They are carted away by men in hasmat suits and re-breather masks. They get placed in sealed containers and incinerated in a crematorium-like facility. This is supposed to prevent diseases from spreading to native plants and crops….
The PredictWind app shows that the weather patterns are quite mild. There are 3 distinct areas. The first area is the trade wind sailing which should be beautiful. Warm consistent breezes will gently bow us north for days. I have my downwind sails ready to be deployed so we can get the best wind advantage. The second section is through a high pressure area where there will be no wind for 1.5 days and we will need to motor. I have enough fuel to motor for 700 of the 1200 nautical miles to NYC if needed. The third section takes us north of 30 degrees where we will start hitting the north-east storms as they rip through the north Atlantic every 1-2 weeks. It is too early to predict with any accuracy, but with any luck we will sail between two systems, missing both of them.
The thing about sailing is that you never know about the weather until it arrives. Starlink will allow us to get accurate updates and Chris Parker will track me as well to direct me to the best weather.
Follow me on:
https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Ileana/
The mangos were amazing, until they weren’t. We donated a bunch to Neptune just outside NYC