The next stop on our “Don’t Stop the Carnival” cruise (which is a great book by Herman Wouk) is Samana in the Domican Republic.  OUr reliable Sat.Nav. unit tells us its a 36 hour cruise across the ocean.  The GPS is the greatest invention for adventurous ocean crossing boaters.  We ended up finding the Dominican Republic, hey, it’s hooked to Haiti and its a big island.  We did miss Samana but did find Purto Plata which is only a 100 miles miss.

It was an ugly 36 hour crossing.  You had to crawl on your hands and knees to go below and the boat kept dropping out from under us.  Trying to use the head was even more fun.  A fierce storm had blown us back west of hispania.

Our first inclination of how bad it was going to be was when we heard people calling for help on the VHF radio and then they started to pray.  We were too far away to help but did relay their position to a father and son on a boat coming back from St. Croix.  We lost contact with both boats around 3am in the morning.