DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - A PLACE SO NICE, WE HAD TO SEE IT TWICE
If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we were trying to make a run from St Thomas, USVI, to the United States last year before hurricane season was in full swing. If you’ve not been following us for long, let me tell you that it didn’t happen.
We had finally had the starboard engine rebuilt and running, and were ready to go (this fiasco could be a novella). We left St Thomas in mid-June, hopped across the south side of Puerto Rico, crossed the Mona Passage, and staged in Bahia Samana Marina in Samana, Dominican Republic. We made two attempts to get out of Samana Bay, the second being the successful attempt.
Once we were past the treacherous north east point of Samana Bay, we turned west along the north coast, and had a beautiful sail into the night. We were headed toward Puerto Plata where Ocean World Marina is located. The plan was an overnight sail, two days of rest at the marina, and then an overnight sail north to Turks and Caicos. The funny thing about us and plans is, it rarely ever pans out.
When we sail overnight, Lisa usually takes the 6 pm to 12 am shift, and then I take the 12 am to 6 am shift. Our calculations were going to put us in at the marina between 8 and 9 am. Everything was going well as I settled into my shift. The wind was light, so we were motor-sailing (sails up and an engine on) in order to stay on schedule.
Not long into my shift, our newly-rebuilt engine started to lose power, sputtered and died. I thought that we possibly had some air in our fuel line, but after a few unsuccessful attempts to get it restarted, I fired up the port engine and continued on into the night. Lisa poked her head out, and I let her know what had happened. I wanted it to be something simple, but I had a knot in my stomach, hoping it wasn’t catastrophic.
When Lisa relieved me the next morning, I asked her to wake me back up when we were about 45 minutes out from the marina, so I could try to bleed the fuel lines on the starboard engine and get it running. It’s a little difficult to maneuver our boat through a marina and into a slip when only one engine is running.
A couple of hours later, I was in the engine compartment, checking all of the bleed points for the fuel system. Everything checked out, but it still wouldn’t start. We hailed the marina on the radio and Eddie, the dock master, advised us that they had a T-head open that we could just motor forward to, making docking a bit easier. Eddie and Pedro met us on the T-head, helped us secure our lines, and let us know that they had a mechanic if we needed help with the engine.
After checking in with the marina, customs, immigration, and drug enforcement, we met with Arturo, the mechanic. Eddie translated for the two of us (Arturo doesn’t speak English, and my Spanish is not up to par to explain engine symptoms). Arturo grabbed some tools, and met us back at the boat to troubleshoot. The final diagnosis was not compression in the #1 cylinder. He would need to take the engine apart to completely diagnose it.
Arturo went back for more tools and his assistant. They removed the engine, got it onto the dock, and loaded it onto a dolly to haul it to his on-site shop. About forty-five minutes later, Eddie came back by the boat to let me know that Arturo had it dismantled and had found some major issues.
Eddie drove me over to Arturo’s shop where our engine was in pieces on his work bench. Arturo explained that there was diesel contamination in our oil, which essentially made the oil useless as a lubricant. The engine was severely damaged, was going to require another rebuild or replacement.
Now, imagine hearing this about an engine that you just had rebuilt for (including parts) a little over several thousand dollars, and had used for approximately 20 hours. Needless to say, I was a little miffed.
Eddie drove me back to the boat, and I explained to Lisa what I had found out. I already knew what parts were going to cost, because I had just bought them two weeks prior, and the marina gave a labor estimate of about $2500. We felt like we didn’t have a choice, and opted to have the engine re-rebuilt. We hoped that getting parts in and having the rebuild completed would take about a week and we’d be on our way. Remember what I said about plans?
We spent that week doing a little bit of exploring around Puerto Plata and waiting for parts to arrive. We visited Ocean World Adventure Park, rode the Teleferico (cable car), went to 27 Falls of Damajagua, and checked out some natural caves and Kite Beach.
Getting the parts through customs was not as smooth as I had hoped. It took four days for customs to clear our shipment and release it to us. Once we had the parts to Arturo we hoped for a completed and installed engine in a week. Plans…
Long story short, we ended up needing additional parts (new injectors and injector pump) that were going to delay us to the point that it was going to be risky to try to get the boat back to the US safely. It was now the end of July, Lisa and the kids had flown to Phoenix to visit family, we had another failed plan of Kevin and I sailing the boat straight through to Florida, and we were going to have to leave the boat in Dominican Republic for the remainder of hurricane season.
Before leaving, I moved the boat to an over-sized slip, stripped the exterior of the boat of solar panels, dismantled the wind generator, secured the dinghy to the coach roof, and tied that sucker off like I was expecting a hurricane to blow over. It’s a good thing that I did.
I met the family in Phoenix the first week of August, and we spent a month or so visiting family and friends. We agreed (more like jumped on the opportunity) to help our good friends, the Ispas family, move from Phoenix across country to Woodstock, Georgia. This would get us back to the east coast, and make a flight back to Dominican Republic a bit less expensive.
I think we were driving through Texas when Victor from Ocean World Marina called me to advise that hurricane Irma was at category 5 and was tracking for landfall on the north coast, right where the marina was. He let me know that ours was the only boat left in the marina (everyone else had left to hunker down in the local hurricane hole, Luperon) and wanted to know if I was able to come back and move it.
Had I been able to get on the next flight, I would have arrived at the marina with about four hours before Irma was scheduled to hit the area. This would have given me, by myself, four hours to sail to Luperon, try to find a spot to tie off in the mangroves, unload the dinghy and reattach the outboard, set two anchors off the stern, get the dinghy back on top of the boat, and ride out the hurricane on the boat. I love our boat, but no thanks.
We let Victor know that we couldn’t get back, and asked that they add another couple of lines to help secure it in it’s slip. He let me know that they would, and I advised that I would be in touch after everything passed through. I hung up the phone and had the thought “God, either take this boat away from us, or allow it to ride out the storm undamaged. I don’t want to have to spend months doing repairs again.”
A few days later, I was able to get a hold of Eddie. He let me know that it appeared that the boat was fine, other than losing our two-piece acrylic windshield out of the cockpit. Irma tracked north of the coast, and while there was damage in Puerta Plata, it was not as devastating as what was predicted. God had answered many prayers and protected our boat from a category 5 hurricane. A major sigh of relief.
The side story to our trip home was Lisa’s right wrist. She had started having pain in it while we were still in St Thomas. She is an online professor, and the pain was directly related to her typing so much. She submitted a claim through Workman’s Compensation in March of 2017. She finally had surgery to relieve a damaged tendon a couple of days before Christmas. Another month of physical therapy and she was finally good to go. Wowza. I won’t go into the details of the flaming hoops that were jumped through in order to finally have the surgery completed, but just know that they were extensive. And flaming.
Thank God the Ispas family loves us as much as they do, or did. They assure us that after staying with them in Woodstock for nearly five months that they still love us just the same. We actually had a great time with them. Unfortunately, Sam spent most of that time back in Phoenix completing a large building project, but when he made trips home, the shenanigans were in full effect. We celebrated kids' birthdays, Thanksgiving with the Ispas and Beck families, Christmas, Heidi Becks 50th birthday along with the Andrews family, and New Years together. Basically, we were adopted in by the Ispas as their own family. What a blessing.
We actually managed to do a bit of travel and exploring while staying with the Ispas. We visited Florida (video!!) and South Carolina with Simona, Samuel, Julia, and Anthony (Simona’s younger brother), visited Lisa’s family in Louisiana and Texas, took a history trip up the east coast to Washington DC, New Jersey, New York (video!!), and Philadelphia, took Anthony with us to visit Savannah, Georgia, took Anthony with us to visit Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and explored several very cool spots around Georgia with Sam, Simona, and the kids. Lisa and I also took a short cruise for our 23rd anniversary to Key West and Cozumel. Time was definitely not wasted!
Night shots of Savannah:
Key West and Cozumel:
So, let me bring you back around to late February. It was finally time to get back to By Faith. We packed our stuff, cleared out of Samuel and Julia’s rooms, cried, hugged, and hopped a plane back to Dominican Republic Tuesday afternoon. After a layover in Ft Lauderdale, we arrived at about 2 am local time Wednesday morning, collected our six suitcases and four backpacks full of all sorts of stuff, and crossed our fingers we wouldn’t be inspected as we passed through customs. We made it through unscathed.
We got back to the marina at about 4 am, grabbed the necessities for the night out of the car, and walked to the boat. Eddie had tied it off to the dock for us so we were able to step right on, open the companionway, and enjoy the hot musty air inside. Ugh. Everybody piled into the master stateroom bed, fired up the fans, and crashed.
I honestly don’t remember much about the next day, but I think it involved checking back in to the marina and trying to air out the boat when it wasn’t raining. Apparently it had been raining everyday for about three weeks, maximizing the amount of humidity inside the closed up boat via a few small leaks in windows and hatches. Yay. Lisa spent the majority of the next two weeks disinfecting every surface of the boat while I reattached solar panels, making room to sit in the settee (couch).
The rest of our month long stay in Puerto Plata was relatively uneventful, unless you are crew on By Faith. There was provisioning to do, dentists to visit, parts to find and paint to buy. We spent what seemed like every day working on one thing or another on the interior of exterior. Nearly everything with fabric was washed and dried, and touch up paint was done throughout the interior by Lisa and the girls. We brought mesh fabric back with us to fix our cockpit bench cushions and have screens made for the exterior windows to help minimize the heat of the Caribbean sun.
We had a new cockpit bimini top and a matching hatch cover for our main hatch made and installed. The entirety of the decks and cockpit were sanded, primed, and repainted. The swim ladder was repaired and the swim deck got a sanding and new coat of non-slip paint. Arturo finished up our engine, rebuilt our dinghy outboard carburetor, and helped me get our portable generator going. Jesus helped me with several of these projects, did some fiberglass and painting on the rub rails, and cleaned our bottom. Finally, eight months later than planned, we were ready to shove off and head to Turks and Caicos.
The morning of our departure, we were still finishing small projects. We finally wrapped up, and went up to the office to settle our account, get a group photo with the staff, and take our last golf cart ride with Eddie back to the boat. The staff at Ocean World became like family who constantly stepped in to help us with every possible need. Customs and Immigration gave us the clearance papers we needed, and after many handshakes, we were released from the dock and headed off on an overnight sail. Adios, Dominican Republic!
