The customs officer who checked us in, noticed my necklace and let me know that his wife makes jewelry with the stone and he would love to set up a meeting for us to buy some from him. 

First we took to the streets and found stores filled to the brim with the stuff, I was so ready to buy it all!

Once I was blue enough to be a smerff, we headed out to see what else there was to do and see in Barahona.

We thought about visiting the mine, but we were all too cheap to pay for the cab ride out to it, so we all stuck around town and just took in the scene.

There was not all that much to do in the town itself, and to be honest, we were really just walking around the streets taking in the people and the little shops. Together, we thought about renting a car or scooters to  get up into the mountains or to visit some things around, but we just didn’t have the urge to make it actually happen. There was something that was just keeping us in place, it must have been the fact that the wind was just blowing so hard from the east it was hard to think about anything else. 

Cruising the DR is not that easy, they have some strict rules about anchoring and moving around. You have to get clearance to move to a new spot and most places do not have anchorages, so you have to use a marina.

Jon and I were definitely on a time crunch at this point, as we needed to get to get back to California for our family trip to Italy.  It was now April 1st and we had a bingo date of April 8th waiting for a weather window in order to sail to Curaçao. If a window did not show itself, then we would have to sail to PR and leave our boat there for our trip to Italy. Which would then make us come back to PR after our trip, THEN sail down to Curaçao so Prism would be out of the hurricane belt and then fly back home to California again to spend the summer working our old jobs.

The immigration officer in Barahona did warn us not to venture out too much at night, but also that night time is when the city became a live. Most of the street venders opened around 7 pm, so we did not get to try a lot of the street food, sadly. Not to mention that the “dinghy dock” was the very large and rough concrete sea wall at the immigration building, which made dinghy landing quite difficult. The dock was exposed to the strong East winds and only had a very sad rope ladder to climb up. 

Jon took it upon himself to rebuild this ladder, which made getting on top of the dock a bit easier. But we still needed to bring large fenders with us to keep our dinghys from being impaled by rebar.

So we spent our days hanging together, having beers at the little spot in the inner harbor until the weather looked better. 

We made an appointment with the official whos’ wife made the Larimar jewelry. He charged by the gram and it was more money than the pieces from the local shops, but we figured to get on the good side of the officials we should buy from him. 

We had 2 days till our BINGO and wouldn’t you know it, a window showed itself! We all went out to dinner our last night together. We were all shocked at how good this dinner spot was and how affordable! We kicked ourselves for not venturing out more at night to seek out more of the local bites!

The next day we checked out. It was easy enough and we were not charged anything. But we were “rushed” a little with the timing. The only down fall about checking out of the DR, is that once you check out, you HAVE to leave within the hour. We did not know this until we had all our paperwork and the official was doing the final inspection of our boat. When we mentioned that we were planning on departing around 2 in the morning, he said that was not possible.  It was now around 5pm, and the winds were still piping from the east. They were forecasted to be way down around 1 am, hence why we were planning on a 2 am departure. Plus we still had to prep Prism for the passage. When I told the official that we could in no way leave the harbor within an hour for even just safety reasons he said too bad.

I texted the local immigration guy on whatsapp ( he had been giving us local intel the whole time we were there). When I asked him what the ramifications could be from not leaving right away he replied with ” Well, everyone goes home at 6, so there is no one to really see if you have left or not.”

We took that information with a gain of salt and worked as fast as we could to get Prism ready for the passage. This passage was going to start out a bit rough too, as we needed to move as far east as possible before turning south with our bow pointed at Bonaire.

With the East trade winds forecasted to be lower for the next few days, we readied Prism and were ready to leave the harbor around 8 pm. We did not want to push our luck any further than 2 hours past our official departure time. Away we went waving goodbye to FIN once again, knowing we would not see them for over 6 months 🙁

April 5, 2022 8pm 

As we left Barahona, Prism was faced with wind and waves on the bow as we hugged the south coast of the DR.  “Where in the hell are those kadabatic winds?” We kept asking each other. Lucky for us this bash was not as bad as the one around Haiti, so we just held on and made our way east. As forecasted, the east winds did die down a little, which helped us keep moving along even during the daylight hours. We reached the south east tip of the DR around 10pm, just a little over 24 hours of straight motoring. 

We anchored for the night off of Las Palmillas. In the morning we prepped Prism a bit more for our passage, did a final rig inspection, made some meals for the passage and checked the weather one last time. 

When everything looked good, we weighed anchor and set off with our bow still pointed East as we round the tip of the DR and worked our way across the Mono Passage.