our utmost priority and full attention was dedicated to our motor over the past week. why are you not working? what happened to you? what can we do to make you work again? we received so much support, tips, tricks and ideas from the community. we were stunned about the willingness of strangers to help with their expertise. whenever someone couldn’t help any further we were pointed to another contact. we are certain that the from us treated diesel bug we had in our tank didn’t support the motor either. the whose we used to pump out the diesel is actually transparent and not black…
we changed the diesel filter, cleaned the water separator, emptied the diesel tank, installed a replacement tank with fresh and clean diesel, blead the system, cracked the injectors, … the list is endless. the engine just does not want to fire.
engines are so fascinating but so frustrating at the same time if they do not want to work! we keep trying… fingers crossed we get the engine to work soon…
at the same time life continued in barahona. cooking, cleaning, provisioning at the local market spiked with super flirtatious guys trying to get a ticket out of the dominican republic (DR) – from shoe polisher to armada guys unscrupulous, all straight to the point – want a baby? no thanks. haha. it did not matter if mo was standing right next to me or not, he used to be a good shield to protect me from these rather offensive flirt attempts.
where we landed with our dinghies was the coast guards terittory. one day when we tried to get back to our boats we were stopped at the gate. we were told that they caught two guys smuggling drugs from colombia. they took the trip on a little fishing boat with two outborders and a total of 125ps, 3 days there and 3 days back – insane!! the boat full of empty diesel tanks and drugs. we were then told all the boats stacked on top of each other on 3 levels carried the same story. uffff.
barahona was only supposed to be a short stopover to break up the trip along the coast of DR. the bay we were anchoring in is normally for container ships to offload goods from overseas and not a beautiful bay for a swim. we spotted a good weather window and decided to leave. the same way we got in we got out again… thank you a million sy wind of change. we were towed out of the bay and were hoping for the wind to pick up.
we waited for the wind for 27nm out of the 33nm, suddenly as if someone turned a switch we had 25knots blowing against us – predicted was the opposite. it took us another 2.5 hrs for the last 6nm. we would have had no chance to get into the bay with this wind from the east, thus were pulled all the way back into safety. honestly, there are no words I could use to express my gratefulness for your support tina and werner!! we feel so much better here in punta las salinas and really enjoy your company and our adventures exploring. here we are comfortable to be left behind, whenever you decide to continue your journey…
to have a break and some time away from the boat and our motor we went to discover the dunes and the las salinas beach.
