The Journey to Puerto Rico [EP 9] | Sailing Millennial Falcon

Don't waste your nachos! No, especially not nachos. Don't, or share your nachos! Share your freaking nachos! Last episode we were riding Turks and Caicos. Unfortunately our outboard finally gave up the ghost and so we walked around Provo island on the search for a new one. Finally found one and decided to head to Grand Turks, the capital city of Turks and Caicos. Margaritaville. Margaritaville, Turks and Caicos. And yeah, it's a very touristy place here, Grand Turks. We sat there for like an hour and a half and in that time mountains upon mountains of nachos which are $18 a plate. The biggest nachos you've ever seen, like three times the size of the bowl and it's a big bowl. Big as my head. Yes, honestly, no joke, as big as his head. I'm about to go home and eat three day old rice and chickpeas and these people are ordering $18 plates of nachos. And leaving them. Eating three nachos and then going and swimming in the pool and then leaving. Oh my god. Just leaving. So many times I just wanted to walk over there and just grab a few chips. Just a small amount, no one would notice. Watch this space, it could come to that. It really might come to that. Oh, what are we gonna have when we go back? Chickpeas and three day old rice. Some grotty old pasta, probably, that I'll make up. It's the only thing that actually survives. Don't waste your nachos. No, especially not nachos. Share your nachos. Share your freaking nachos. The cruise ships. In the background. In the background. I've been a bit overzealous in our exploration. We kind of ran straight onto a cactus and nestle infested hillside and I paid for us about half of what I collected on the way down. So we're, we just left Turks and Caicos, Big Sands Cay on our way to Puerto Rico. The plan is we were supposed to have an easterly breeze so we were going to run southeast across to Dominican Republic and then tack our way up the coast on the way to Puerto Rico and we were going to tack further up to San Juan because we're on a bit of a schedule so we want to keep hit a few hot spots in Puerto Rico and then carry on south. As it turns out, true to form, the forecast has not been correct. We have not had the 17 knot easterly that we were hoping for. Instead we've had a 23 knot southeasterly and a meter and a half seas. I was doing about six and a half knots. Yeah, so we are running dead south, maybe a smidge west of south and we're making, yeah we're making six and a half, seven knots on a beat, smashing through the swell. Big waves. All the deck plates are leaking, the bell is ringing because we're swinging around, the face has fallen out of the barometer. I don't know why we're laughing. I know, well it's what's left to do but laugh. So it's the second day that we've been sailing for. Yesterday we had a fairly good but rough run and last night it only just kind of got a bit rougher. We discovered a lot more, sun's just coming down, we discovered a lot of leaks in the boat that we didn't realize that we had until obviously it's late at night, you can't see anything and water's kind of coming in from various parts of the boat and it's always at that time of night when you're a little bit concerned but today actually hasn't been too bad when the sun came up but that's something that we'll need to fix at one stage when we fix our whole boat in general. Work in progress. Yeah, work in progress. So yeah, yesterday at about 2am I think it was, we managed to get into Dominican Republic waters and we tacked and now we're just doing a nice little tack against the coast so we're always kind of staying in line with the coast of Dominican Republic just so we're not too far from help if anything happens. So it's day three, we pretty much just got smashed all day. The forecast has been wrong, well not wrong, it has been an easterly but it's not been dying off the way it was forecast to. I think the highest we had today was 29 knots so we've been two reefs and a short jib all day and the seas are just getting larger and larger so we're pretty much hopping the full brunt of the North Atlantic. We're both very tired and praying for a change this evening. We have decided to shorten our journey from, we initially were going to make landfall at San Juan but we're now going to head to the, I forget, Mayerques or something like that. It's on the western side of the, or it's on a western coast in the middle, sort of the first port that you can check into approaching from the east. So we're going to head straight there, should shorten the journey by a day or two, thank god. So we should have about three days left. The boat's holding up all right, the leaking is slowed, we haven't taken too much water over the front yet but we'll see what this evening holds. We are getting slapped around a little bit though. A red sky at night so hopefully this is the last of our wild and windy weather. Wait, it's too dark. You're not in the shot. Give us a very quick rundown of the dreaded day three and how day four went. Dreaded day three. Today's day four right? Yeah, day three yesterday were some pretty hairy seas. We had about, I'm going to say they're about three meter waves. Adam might say that they weren't as big. I reckon they were quite large. It was 10 meters if it was one. They were tidal waves I'll have you know. Anyway the seas were quite big and we're just getting bashed around. Things are flying everywhere, waves specifically were coming over the edge of the boat and it was a little bit scary. Adam stayed out here while I was hiding inside but we managed to get through it. The waves and the winds started to die off mid or now maybe about midnight or so and so it wasn't as bad after then. Thankfully throughout the night. What else happened yesterday? That's about all we just have. Yeah, morale was at an all-time low but it always is on day three. Yes, it's really strange whenever we're going on a passage. I just don't know how long passages are which is why I always say passage. Yeah, day three always seems to be the day when we suddenly think that we're not going as far as we'd like, our morale's a little bit low, things start to get really messy in the house, things start breaking as well. On our trip to, on our way through Bahamas, day three was when we didn't have any wind but yesterday's day three in our trip to Puerto Rico is when we had too much wind in two waves. So we were both, yeah, our morale was down but I think for different reasons and yeah it was a little bit, a little bit nerve-wracking yesterday but we got over it. And then today we are just that much closer to Puerto Rico. We're still skirting the coast I've had chocolate craving that Adam has also joined me on and so I'm currently making brownies and we're drinking hot chocolate. Obviously the day's turned out a little bit better today than it was yesterday. You wouldn't have caught me saying that yesterday. Thank you for watching, if you liked that please give us a thumbs up and click subscribe and check out all the socials in the, am I up? You're that way, all the tags for the social medias, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time.