I thought my Spanish would continue to improve, but actually I've hardly used it since we got to Puerto Rico. Only three people we've talked with knew less English than I know Spanish, and most were quite fluent, since just about every Puerto Rican we've met has lived in the US for several years. At first, as a matter of courtesy, I'd always start out in Spanish, but whoever I was talking with would invariably answer in such perfect English that I felt like a real dunce exercising my limited español. The only exception was a waiter in San Juan, who repeated everything in both English and Spanish, and seemed pleased that one of the unending hordes of tourists actually bothered to learn a little of the local language. We had an animated conversation in Spanish, and when I mentioned that we'd just been to the Dominican Republic he proudly told me he was originally from Sosúa, a town not far from Luperón where we had been.
I've gotten some practice from reading an occasional Spanish-language newspaper, and I've been working through a Reader's Digest. Some of the more interesting lessons have come from reading the subtitles while we're at the movies. As we always suspect when we see a foreign movie subtitled in English, the subtitles tell only the basic gist of the conversation. It's also amusing to see how the translators handle slang and idioms.
We're almost out of Puerto Rican waters and into the Virgin Islands, where the language is, at least nominally, English. (If you've heard island people talk, mon, you know what I mean!) Instead of Spanglish Puerto Rican rock stations ("Señorita a me gusta your style", goes one song we heard practically hourly), we've got English speaking deejays playing American "classic rock" on the radio stations coming in from St. Croix and St. Thomas. But I'm going to keep working on my language tapes, because we're aiming to be in Venezuela by July.
The local newspapers (both Spanish and English) have been fairly light on general US and world news, but they all carry page after page on the Vieques controversy. Shortly after we arrived in Puerto Rico, we read about new studies of health effects on the residents of the civilian section of the island, the governor's request of a court ruling that the US Navy cease bombing, the temporary moratorium, President Bush's comments about the situation, the upcoming transfer of the western third of the island back to civilian use, and about various protests and protestors. Here and there around Puerto Rico we saw bumperstickers and posters, "Paz para Vieques". But the letters to the editor, in the papers, were mixed. Puerto Rico is heavily dependent on US funding, and there's a considerable military presence throughout much of the island. Ever since we left the US, we've been keeping up with the news via NPR on shortwave, as broadcast from the AFN station at Roosevelt Roads Naval Station on the east coast. (We heard very little about Vieques from this source!)
We'd heard that the anchorages in the restricted portion of Vieques were usually open to boaters on weekends, and whenever they weren't actually bombing. We left "mainland" Puerto Rico on a Thursday morning, and since the western section of the island had reverted to the civilian population at the beginning of the month, we felt pretty safe in anchoring at "Green Beach" just under the island's northeast tip. Early Friday morning we headed east along the south coast of Vieques. There are a few bays there in the civilian middle, but we really wanted to anchor in Puerto Ferro, in the restricted zone. Every once in a while we called Vieques Range Control on the VHF, and finally they answered; the range wouldn't be "hot" until after the weekend, so we were free to anchor on the military part of the island, as long as we didn't go ashore.
Both our cruising guide and our Caribbean travel guide credit the Navy for keeping developers out of Vieques. It's certainly a pretty island, verdant mountains and white beaches. Too bad about the bomb craters. We slipped over the 7-foot bar at the narrow entrance to Puerto Ferro, and anchored in the center of the placid bay. Other than a fishing skiff near the entrance, which left shortly after we arrived, ours was the only boat.
We had not come to Puerto Ferro for any of our usual reasons. The only nearby reefs are outside the entrance, battered by the seas; there's no access to town, and the beaches are off limits. But the greenish water in this bay has a very unusual property.
After dinner, after nightfall, when the wind had quieted to a gentle breeze that barely turned our wind generator, we switched off our anchor light, stripped off our clothes, put on our dive masks and snorkels, and jumped overboard. It was like jumping into the starry sky. The water in Puerto Ferro is very strongly bioluminescent, filled with millions of tiny organisms which give off light when disturbed. Most seawater has some bioluminescent organisms, but this bay is dense with them, and we glowed like neon signs moving through the water. Floating behind the boat, my arms stretched out in front of me as motionless as I could make them, it looked as though I were wearing long gloves made out of tiny winking stars, a network of sparkling points all across my skin. Britt kicked hard and dove for the bottom, leaving a luminous cloud in his wake. Every so often we'd see the sinuous trail of a fish swimming by.
The next day we motored hard to windward again until we cleared the eastern tip of the island. Finally, we could put up sails! It was only a few miles to Bahia Icacos, but it was wonderful to turn off the motor, if only for a little while. The anchorage itself is a reef-bound bay, so we were back to eyeball piloting as in the Bahamas; fortunately, the water here is fairly clear, and with high midday sun we could easily see the "blue highway" between the reefs. The reefs protected us from the waves and swell, and gave us an enjoyable afternoon snorkel -- and a delicious evening meal.
Getting into tricky anchorages, like the narrow-throated Puerto Ferro or the reefy Bahia Icacos, is normally made a little easier for us by our computer navigation system. We "draw" our route on the chart, transfer those waypoints to the GPS, and drive in on autopilot -- right?
Wrong. That's the way to get shipwrecked. It's certainly a good tool, and we've used it to get into harbors at night, but only as one component of our navigation arsenal. Computer navigation is only as accurate as the charts you use. And as it turns out, some of our charts are not very accurate at all.
Actually, it's not the charts that are the problem. It's the way the charts were translated from paper to digital format. In Puerto Rico and the Spanish Virgins, we have digital charts from both NOAA and Imray-Iolaire. The Imray-Iolaire charts are all "off-register" by about 500 feet. We can see this by our vessel track, which goes right down the channel when viewed on a NOAA chart, but in the case of Puerto Ferro, for example, showed our path as going right across the beach! Unfortunately, all of our most detailed charts are the Imray-Iolaire ones. They're really nice charts. Too bad the digitizing system is proprietary, so we have no way of re-aligning them into the system.
Because we knew the chart was offset from reality before we entered Bahia Icacos, we only used our waypoints (other than the entry waypoint from the guidebook) as a rough guide. We knew we had to head in somewhat right of the little island, cut in front of it behind the line of breakers, then angle in towards shore, but the only things we could depend on for our actual course line were our eyeballs. We worry, though, that there are cruisers out there who blindly assume their nifty keen-o computer charts are 100% accurate, who might think, "I'm not that proficient at reading the water, so why risk it? I'll just get the waypoints right off the chart!" Next thing they know, they're up on a reef, and all those retro-grouches have one more reason to complain about what a bad idea it is to use computer navigation.