Sunriser

Spanish sailors are a rarity outside Spanish waters; though in the summer holidays anchorages in the Balearics are crowded with Spanish boats, they promptly disappear in September until the following summer. Once we left the European continent and joined the long term sailing community we met people of all nationalities but no Spanish.
I scanned social media in search of this elusive species and I found some but, sadly, none in our neighborhood. The research continued at the other side of the Atlantic but still, Spanish sailors were nowhere to be found…. Until the Dominican Republic, of course the first Spanish speaking island in our journey. You can imagine my joy when we met not one, but two Spanish boats: Zinic II (Luis and Estefy) and Atlantis (Curro and Nieves).

With Luis and Estefy of Zinic II we shared catamaran experiences and made a car trip to Las Terrenas in the North of the Samaná peninsula, originally a fishing village and now a touristic hotspot. The laidback Dominican atmosphere is, however, still there.

The whale season (15 January to March) is rapidly approaching and every day there are new boats arriving to the Samaná bay. We anchored near a small island linked to the main island by a bridge. It is a beautiful spot for sunrise and sundown and we watched quite some of those.

For a third time we requested a “Despacho” from the Armada to go to the national park of Los Haitises. A despacho is a permit, granted by the naval authorities, necessary to go anywhere by boat in the Dominican Republic. It does not cost any money, but a lot of hassle, as it can only be granted for the same day, only for one place at a time and for a maximum of 5 days. On top of that, there are often power outages and the documents cannot be printed. After lots of patience and negotiation we managed to obtain our Despacho and left again for Los Haitises, this time we discovered some new places with Curro and Nieves from Atlantis.

The coast of Los Haitises is full of scattered rocks and cliffs providing numerous areas where boats can shelter from wind and waves. We had heard of a hurricane hole which we wanted to check out. A very narrow entrance opens into a lagoon in between rock and mangrove walls providing protection. The depth is only 2 meters but with the shallow draught of 1.25m of Sunriser we dared to sail in very slowly and found ourselves in a magical place.

Los Haitises is a mangrove area almost impenetrable; we were able to find a single walking path from the shore that we could reach by dinghy and managed to come on land to stretch a bit our legs on a very muddy walk. Sadly, even in this very wild and remote place the plastic debris is omnipresent.

We are already more than a month in the Dominican Republic… and still have not seen a single whale. We get offered whale watching tours every time we set foot in town but of course, we want to bring Sunriser to the whales. As the season proceeds the whales move deeper into the bay so we hope that the next post will be about whale watching 🤞🏿