Puerto Rico!

Puerto Rico was a fun place to visit, and we wish we had more time. We struggled to balance our time between site-seeing and boat chores, but I think we did well in the end. The good thing about boat chores is that it often requires you to run around a city looking for appropriate parts (like deburring tools) which means you get to see more of the day-to-day life of the city, not just the touristy areas.

We arrived late on Monday so we checked in then went to get groceries and dinner. We ended up having most of our dinners out when in Puerto Rico. I was thankful for the break in cooking dinners.

The next day Kevin and I went for a run to pick up the rental car. It was the first time that I have felt I could run in the Caribbean heat! It was short but felt good to stretch my legs out a little more. With the rental car we were able to go to the big marine store, West Marine, and pick up some stuff. Then, we went to see Castillo San Felipe del Morro, a 500 year old fort at the entrance to San Juan Harbor. It was first built by the Spanish that occupied Puerto Rico for 400 years and modified and added to over the years. Luckily, our kids actually like going to forts and museums. The fort had lots of history to read about (history lesson for the day for all the children!) and great views of the harbour and surrounding city.

Wednesday, we actually spent most of the morning on the boat. I think this is a testament to our comfort on the boat now. We can putter around the boat like we used to in our house. Kevin was setting up our AIS system. This is a GPS tracking system that allows us to see other boat on our chart plotter and have them see us as well. It also allows us to see people if they fall overboard as all our life vests have AIS transponders in them. It is obviously an important safety system on the boat and one we were eager to get it up and running but had trouble sourcing all the parts until San Juan (and even then required some running around).

When we finally did leave the boat, we went to old town San Juan. It is a very pretty, quaint part of the city. There are brightly coloured, fairly well-maintained buildings, and cobble stone streets. There was also a  playground for the little kids to play at. We found ourselves a Puerto Rican restaurant so we could have some authentic food. I had a stuffed mofongo. A mofongo is usually a ball formed from cooked and mashed plantains mixed with garlic and broth. However, this dish had the mofongo shaped into a bowel and stuffed with chicken and onions in a tomato-based sauce. It was pretty tasty. We finished off our evening with a stop at a very popular ice cream parlor before another run to the boat store so Kevin could finish off his project for the day.

What was planned to be our last day was packed full of stuff to do. There were several more boat parts Kevin needed so we did another trip to the boat store and then to the hardware store. It is interesting to be in a familiar store in a foreign country. We went to a Home Depot and everything was the same as at home, of course. They were having ‘get ready for Hurricane season’ sale. Yikes! Time to get further north.

From there we drove out to the east coast of the island to El Yunque National Forest. This was a super nice way to spend the afternoon. There are several spots in the park that you can stop and check out views of the island or old structures and then there are several hikes to do. Some of these were closed due to maintenance. We needed reservations to get into the park. They set up this system to control how busy it was in the park. We chose to do a medium length hike, listed to take 1.5 hours round trip but it seems the kids were energized that day and we did it in half the time. It went up to an old tower. The forest had beautiful foliage with bright flowers, palm trees, bamboo and plants with giant leaves. In the early 1900’s they put in a public bath /pool in the park. The pools are no longer in use, but you can walk around them and the old building associated with them. We dipped our feet in the river that feeds them. There are waterfalls as well, and one with a small pool you can swim in at the bottom, but this was the busiest spot in the park so we just looked at it and kept going.

Finally, we made another stop at a boat shop, still looking for a final part, before going to Costco to provision for our next leg of our journey. We are going to go to Grand Turks and then onto the Bahamas and Florida! We suspected it would take 9 days. Even though we plan to stop at several islands, we are not certain how good they are for provisions, so we wanted to stock up for the whole 9 days if needed. Costco was much the same as at home as well, although it appears that people in Puerto Rico don’t eat nearly the same amount of bread products as we do in Canada. There were very limited bread options compared to home. There was however, many options for pork. We grabbed some churros and a couple chicken meat pockets on our way out, which was good because by the time we got back to the boat it was so late we went to bed and that proved to be our dinner for the night. We were so excited to do all our provisioning shopping at one store, that we forgot to take into account the size of our rental vehicles. As an aside, finding vehicles for 6 people has been challenging down here. We walked out to the parking lot with our two carts full of groceries and noticed that our car was the smallest in the lot! Our rental car was a medium-sized hatchback and the kids were all squashed in the back seat with Norah and Simon sharing a seatbelt. We filled the back (there were already 6 jerry cans in the trunk) and then all the kids laps (or under their bums in Norah and Simon’s case) and under our seats with food. Luckily, we didn’t have to strap the toilet paper to the roof. This also meant two dinghy rides taking stuff back to the boat from the car. We are well-stocked now.

We ended up spending 4 days there because again, it took more than a day to get ourselves signed out of the country. Being an American territory, you can use an app to sign into the country when arriving by private vessel, and purchase an annual cruising permit for all the U.S. Which means that checking into any U.S. port will be smoother going forward. They are not too fussed about having you sign out, but subsequent countries like to see where you have been and have the paperwork to show it. So, we had to get a form completed and signed by customs before leaving. We talked to them the evening before and the guy said to send the form by email to him, but by the time we did, he was off work. He was off work the next day for the long weekend (yes, another holiday here, Memorial Day), so we talked with a new guy. He told us to come to the port to have the form signed, but he couldn’t see us until 5:30pm because he was checking a ferry out of country until then. Fortunately, when we arrived just before 6pm it took only 2 minutes to do the paperwork.  Needless to say, we decided to leave the next morning. We had additional boat things to work on anyway. We also had to do another run to the gas station for more diesel.  There was a fuel dock at the marina, but it was small, allowing only our dinghy and not the Seasura and furthermore, was not frequently manned. We also had to pick-up a package that we forgot (oops!) the day before at Fedex, a part to more permanently fix the waste water pump system. It was so nice to order a part and have it arrive in just 2 days and not have to go through 3 people and several forms to pick it up!

Delayed by one day yet again, but we did manage to get out of Puerto Rico the next day and we are now sailing into and through the Bahamas! We hope that when we bring our boat back to the Caribbean next year that we can spend more time and see more in the islands.