Sailing Life Day 325: Motoring from Guanica to Ponce when our Engine almost overheat!

"Everything happens for a reason" - I know you guys already know that this is my favorite belief for years.

We love meeting new people while we travel and sailing along the south coast of Puerto Rico has been amazing. We are anchored here in Gilligan's Island, Guanica in Puerto Rico. When Jonathan and I came back to Empress yesterday, a local guy on a boat came over to offer us to fill up our drinking water tank using the hose on his dock! ⛵️

It turned out that Rafael or Rafa is a professional boat delivery captain, so he knows just what it's like to run out of water!

Then he offered to drive us to the nearest big town, Ponce so we could reprovision the boat at a members-only wholesale store (Sam’s club). We drove there in his pickup truck and thanks to Rafa we filled our s/v Empress with food and saved a lot of money too.

The food we bought would have filled our entire dinghy, so he loaded it all onto his pontoon boat and delivered it to Empress for us!

Rafa and his wife are amazing people and they run a guesthouse overlooking Guilligans Island here next to Guanica, called Guilligans View Apartments, with kayaks, paddle boards and a boat ferry guests to the popular Guilligans Island.

When we left Guilligan’s Island at 4 am today, we should have had a short 3 and a half hour motorsail east to Ponce, but our engine overheated right outside the cargo ship port entrance to Guayanil, so with almost no wind we were drifting in the path of massive container ships. The cause of the problem wasn’t one of the simple ones, so Jonathan decided to leave the engine alone to cool down so we would be able to start if we had to get out of the way of any ships.

We were considering trying to pull into Guayanill, so we called Rafa to see if it would be worth it, or if we should just turn back downwind to Guilligans to find and repair the problem. Instead of that, he just offered right away to come out in his boat and tow us back. We turned around to try to get closer to him, but we could only move west at 1 knot in the light winds. When he arrived Rafa said he might as well tow us straight to Ponce because it was closer than going back. So Jonathan used our anchor bridle as a towing bridle and we were dragged into Ponce at over 6 knots! ⛵️😱

Could we have waited for wind and continued sailing to Ponce? Probably, but that would also have left us beating into the trade winds into the afternoon when the seas get pretty rough.

Now we’ll probably hang out here in Ponce for about a week to carry on with work on the boat before we carry on to Salinas.🙏

Thanks so much, Rafa of Guilligan View Apartments and we’ll definitely see you again before we leave.😍 I really love the Puerto Ricans!! The people here just like Rafa are nice and helpful!😍🙏