Provo to Dominican Republic

...Destination the DR. This map shows the entrance to Samana...

We are planning our next run from Provo, South Side Marina to Samana in the Dominican Republic. This trip is broken up into 3 main legs. The first leg is 40 nm to run the Caicos Banks and get to sea. The second leg is 27 nm southeast towards Big Sand Cay where we may drop an anchor for a few hours to time our next leg. The third leg is a 180 nm leg to Samana, Dominican Republic. We have several back up plans to divert short of Samana to other harbors in the Dominican Republic such as Rio San Juan or Sousa or Ocean World, if necessary.

We are fortunate to continue to travel with Meloney and Don from California, aboard a Lagoon 38 catamaran named "Fezywig" (a happy character in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol") and Bill and Lauren from Canada on a Grand Banks 42 trawler named "Sea Star." Our boats are surprisingly similar in speed and depth. These lively and interesting new friends are a lot of fun. We are delighted to be able to plan our passages together. Many minds are better than one!

As much as we are enjoying Provo and especially South Side Marina, we must leave! This is a very good weather window because the prevailing easterly trades have stalled. The winds are looking calm, 10-15 knots or possibly less. We most likely will need to motor sail to keep the speeds up to make the destination within the weather window. This often seems to be the issue. We wait for weather to be calm enough to go to sea, but then we are usually running before a front which pulls all the air into the approaching front and takes away the winds. Then the frontal system will arrive and we are trying to beat that arrival by getting to our destination before the front hits with squalls and much higher veering winds. It is really a speed, time and distance challenge. This trip is 247 nautical miles and, at 5.5 knots it will take 45 hours. Now we need to plan a stop into the trip to arrive DR in daylight (for visibility) and in the morning (for the lightest winds). We will use Big Sand Key as a stopping point to make the timing work out. If all goes as planned, we will depart Sunday at 0700 and arrive Samana, Dominican Republic, Tuesday between 0800 - 1100.

Here is the route on OpenCPN, showing our 5 legs and the mileage for each on Sun, Mon and Tues.

Using OpenCPN and NVCharts we can plan routes, distances and times on the laptop

Here are some Predict Wind planning images:

The winds for our Sunday morning departure as we run the Caicos Banks to sea

Monday shows favorable winds all day as we run SE towards the DR

Remember, we are running a live tracking map by Garmin InReach. You can check out where we are at any time. https://share.garmin.com/IslandSpirit

Blue shows our routes since November 2017 and red shows this next passage.

Thank you for sailing along.....