As you guys know by now that as a writer I enjoy the process of creation, I enjoy writing. As an author I can find and enjoy and share interesting stories I run across. Sometimes, however, I write whatever random stuff enters my brain.
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Navy Crazy
So this is the one that just came up today that I personally find the most interesting story for you. Please have patience and follow my jumpy story telling… put these pieces together…
Enjoy….
Did you know that the Dominican Republic is not Canada and is also not the United Sates…. (I know shocking huh)
Did you know that when in a foreign country they may think and do things differently than we might deem reasonable..?
Did you know that they have almost no safety rules here?
Did you know that a family of 5 can ride on a motorcycle while driver dads is chugging a beer? and the police have no concerns at all.
Did you know that you can pour a can of diesel right into the water and that is fine with them. Garbage just toss it in the Ocean too… no worries…
Did you know that there is a hurricane (really only a tropical storm now) passing WAAAYYY offshore way north of us this weekend? Really nothing more than I have sailed the edges of many times. In fact pretty much most sailors here have sailed in or near storms like this. BUT… it is way far away from us now and not having much effect here in Luperon except maybe to suck the wind away.
So if we look at the wave and swell information from Windy… we can see that really the sailing conditions for here are completely fine… no big deal at all. All though the waves inside the storm are 5 meters (15 feet for my American friends) this is 200 miles away from us.
Offshore Dominican Republic the waves are 1 meter. Really no reason to panic… honestly for us Sailors we think going sailing in 1 meter waves is a lovely easy sail. Nothing that would concern us at all.
Did you know… the sailing club here called the Cambiaso sailing group usually goes sailing every weekend about 5 miles east along the coast to a lovely beach aptly named Cambiaso beach.
Yesterday a bunch of sailors decided to make their usual sail to the beach for the day. They informed and got consent from the Navy as usual.
My good friend Ken observed a bunch of sailboats sail out of Luperon bay yesterday morning at around 9am. The Navy had been informed of their usual trip.
My good friend then observed a Yolas with 2 uniformed Navy men on board go motoring out of the bay about half an hour later. (Not sure if you know the Navy does not have a working boat of their own here)
This morning this text went out to the Cambiaso sailing group…
This seemed like a very odd thing to me….
I was curious…
Why would the sailing club just anchor in the channel for the afternoon? It seems so weird to me…
So here is something interesting…. The Dominican Navy commander somewhere like in Santiago or SantoDomingo made the decision that “for safety” reasons he was forbidding Gringos from going sailing this weekend. He passed the order down to the local Navy Commadante here who then dispatched 2 men to borrow a Yolas and chase down the white sailors and make them come back to the safety of Luperon harbor. You know…. for their own protection and safety…!!!!
Yep… sounds completely crazy to me too. Like how do they think we all got here….? We all sailed in that big bad Ocean in much much worse conditions to get here. We can handle 1 meter waves. We are actually all good sailors and we actually know what we are doing out on the Ocean.
This order of course did not apply to the locals who were seen out there in their little Yolas’s as usual fishing like any other calm day.
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This is the weird thing about here… We think of the military as being for military protection of our homelands and to go to war zones and play. In the DR they use the Navy like policemen to enforce the whimsical moods of the government.
Weirdly the government seems to have very much interest in having very tight control over us white sailors. They treat us like bad children. We cannot do anything without their specific permission. For a country with no concept of safety they are weirdly obsessed with our sailor safety or control.
This is what makes coming sailing to the Dominican Republic a bad idea. You cannot anchor anywhere along the coast unless they have specific and tight control of you. You cannot move your boat without their permission. Like a prisoner your boat must be tightly controlled. Somehow they act like they feel you and your sailboat pose some kind of threat.
Maybe they worry that if us Gringos got organized our Navy fleet would be bigger than theirs and maybe they think we would pose a threat… to their Yolas Navy… 🙂
Well…. this is nothing if not interesting…
I never promised to be politically correct in my Blogs… just open and honest.
Cheers Sailors…
Captain Lexi …. the ever curious…
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