We left and came back. The reason why in this cruising report...
Monday 10th of December 2007 in Puerto Cortez
It doesn’t look to attractive today. Gray, squally, lots of rain and for the first time that we are here in Puerto Cortez the wind blows out of the NE, the direction we want to go.
The quality of the NOAA weather forecast is doubtful. I noticed today that they were transmitting the forecast of yesterday. And this is not the first time this is happening in the 9 years that I try to value this weather-information source. They don’t learn of their mistakes and they don’t tell if they make mistakes.
So, we decided to stay a bit longer. No use getting wet in the first 5 minutes you start sailing. Besides that, the limited visibility gives me depressing feelings.
In the afternoon it cleared up and we decided to go. I took the dinghy aboard and encountered a dead dog-puppy floating around. If I would be superstitious I definitely would cancel the departure. But I’m not.
We left around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, sailing. When we finally arrived at the cape to turn our boat we encountered a huge swell from the east and no wind. The NOAA weather forcast was telling something at the same time about a ridge and a post-hurricane tropical storm building up…somewhere. The sound quality was to lousy to get the Lat-Lon down. I decided to turn back and wait for a better moment.
Later on that night, I got a better reception of the tropical storm ‘Olga’. It turned out to go over the Dominican Republic and then go west, direction Cuba and the Bahamas. No direct consequences for us.
Two years ago we were coming back from Santiago de Cuba to the Rio Dulce. Finally we would have a broad reach sail, so I told Vivian. It turned out to be one of our nastiest sailing-experiences as we were the whole time in a depression. Strong westwinds, a lot of thunderstorms. This monster had the same travelling speed as we had. NOAA came after 3 days to report that it was the first tropical depression of the year (it was still May).
Normally tropical storms are during the hurricane season, that is in the Caribbean from June to December.
