The Turks and Caicos Islands stretch in a shallow arc from West Caicos in the west to Grand Turk in the east. Within this arc is the Caicos Bank, an area of shoal water dotted with coral heads.
    It is possible to take seven feet across the bank if you avoid the dark patches, but it is important to reach the anchorage at the Ambergris Cays before the light fails. The distance is 45 miles so we motorsailed flat out in the stiff easterly to get the hook down in what seems, at first, a very open anchorage but which is, in fact, quite secure.
    There were some derelict fishermen's cottages to look at on Big Ambergris but no other signs of life. The sunny and breezy weather looked to be set in for a while, and I suspected it might be some time before we could press on for the Dominican Republic. We amused ourselves for two days by fishing, swimming, reading, and doing maintenance. On the third day the trades were still rock steady from the southeast, and I was beginning to think they might never switch to the northeast and sit down a bit. We would be fighting the north-setting current in the Turks Passage and then the easterly-setting Equatorial Current-an impossibly masochistic endeavor with half a gale on the nose.

    By day four I was going stir crazy and even the ever-placid Carol was getting twitchy. We were low on water, and the cloudless blue sky offered no hope of salvation from that quarter. We were also low on interesting food and, despite Carol's culinary creativity with canned goods, we craved something fresh and crunchy. I decided we would head north from this featureless place and visit the small town on South Caicos.
    By early afternoon we were anchored off the dilapidated commercial dock of this very dilapidated little town. At the general store alongside Seaview Marina, South Caicos, you can buy a false hairpiece for $8 and an artificial Christmas tree for $35, but you can't buy water at any price. A little worm of worry stirred in my belly. We bought a few groceries and arranged for a visit from the immigration officer. We had cleared out of the Turks and Caicos at Providenciales, not intending to go ashore again in the country, but now we had to clear in again before setting off to explore the town.
    The houses are stone shanties with rusted iron roofs, and the streets are unpaved. Signs of dereliction and decay were all around; abandoned buildings, collapsed piers; and rotting hulks of fishing boats. Local industry is centered on the fish factory, conch farming, and spiny lobster catching. The young men free dive a hundred feet to pluck lobster from the rocks and gather conch from the bottom. They make a decent living for a while, but by 35 or so they are spent and retire to idle away their lives, many taking to the rum bottle. The population of South Caicos has fallen from four thousand to just a thousand in less than ten years, and there seems little hope of halting the decline.
    The old Admirals Inn was once a thriving establishment frequented by drug-running pilots; the locations of downed planes were marked on the huge wall-chart in what was then the bar. It must have been a wild place in those days with rum flowing like water and parties going on for days. Now, the inn is a field study center for American college kids, and Carol was able to call our daughter Melinda, on their direct phone line to the states.
    The hotel next door was deserted except for a couple of study center inmates doing their homework over cold Heinekens. We joined them for one before strolling back through the powdered coral streets to the dock. We were really glad to have made this diversion to South Caicos because we now had a more balanced view of this strange country. Providenciales and its apparent wealth is one side of the coin, this ramshackle community is the other. A common denominator is the uncommon generosity of the wonderful people who live here.
    Back at Seaview Marina, we chatted with the owner and I mentioned my worry over our lack of water. He told me that water was always in short supply on South Caicos and it was too precious to sell, but if our need was genuine, he would give us a few gallons from his own rainwater supply. We gratefully lugged two five-gallon jugs back to the dinghy.

Bound for the Dominican Republic
    We had been waiting for the weather to change for eight days, first at Ambergris and then for the past four days at South Caicos, and I was not a happy camper.
    I told Carol that I was thinking of turning back.This bashing towindward was becoming a chore, and I was really afraid we might break something if we battled on. The strain was beginning to show on us, I pointed out, and she had to agree we were looking pretty scrawny.
    I had a picture in my head of Adriana romping back through the Bahamas on a broad reach while we lay naked in the cockpit sipping cold drinks, and then I imagined Adriana beating her way along the north coast of Hispaniola at night, spray reaching all the way back to the cockpit where we huddled miserably under the dodger, foul weather gear and harnesses in place of sun hats and paperbacks. It was a totally unfair comparison of course, but I wasn't going to let a silly thing like reality get in the way of a good sulk.
    Carol wasn't having it. "I will not hear of turning back. I will not be thought of as a wimp, and this trip is the fulfillment of a dream. We are having the time of our lives and you know it, so go and get a weather report because we're heading for Luperon as soon as we get a break" " When you put it like that," I told her, "Luperon here we come!" And wouldn't you know it, the wind came round during the night, and on the morning of 17 March, we set sail for the Dominican Republic in a northeasterly Force 4.
    After the low, scrub-covered atolls of the Bahamas, the island of Hispaniola seemed impossibly high and lush with towering peaks of thick vegetation. I checked the chart for the tenth time since dawn and still had trouble accepting that we were eight miles offshore and not about to hit the beach. With the growing light my perception returned, and anxiety gave way to the delicious anticipation of landfall.
    The overnight trip from South Caicos had been uneventful with the wind far enough off the bow to give us a comfortable ride with the sheets slightly eased. This was in welcome contrast to the head-banging slog to
windward, which characterized the journey from George Town, through the Bahamian Out Islands, and the Turks and Caicos group.
    Luperon had recently become a port of entry for the Dominican Republic, and we chose it for our landfall on Hispaniola over the hustle and bustle of Puerto Plata to the east and the civil strife of that tragic place, Haiti, to the west.

    The lights I had been homing in on belonged to the resort hotel on the western edge of the entrance to the tiny town of Luperon in the Dominican Republic. We skirted the reef which guards the inlet and ran on into the fjord-like anchorage. It was still early but already warm, and not a breath of air ruffled the water in the totally protected lagoon.
     Fishermen in rustic canoes waved a welcome as they passed on the way to the reef, and a fellow cruiser popped his head out of a hatch to call a soft greeting.

    Carol helped me launch the dinghy, stow the sails, and tidy the lines while an official delegation approached from the direction of the concrete pier against which the Navy gunboat lay. The commandante, in full battle dress, and a young civilian sat at opposite ends of a small inflatable rowed by a uniformed midshipman. Crammed into Adriana's tiny saloon, our visitors sipped cold Cokes. The commandante thumbed through our papers while Carlos, the civilian, explained in painful English the clearing-in procedure. The midshipman wrote it all down, laboriously, on a small scrap of paper with a small scrap of pencil. We handed over the required fees, including $10 to purchase the compulsory courtesy flag, and were free to enjoy the delights of the D.R. for an apparently indefinite period.

    The official formalities dispensed with, it was time to get down to business. Carlos was an agent and could, it seemed, obtain anything we might require in the way of provisions and haul them out to the boat. The prices were very reasonable, and the happy little band left with our passports (for stamping in Santo Domingo) and our diesel jugs and propane tanks for replenishment.
    I was convinced this was the last we'd see of the lot, but Carol, possessing a greater faith in her fellow man, assured me this was an admirable arrangement which would spare me considerable frustration and backache (and, of course, she was right). I would be astonished if anything more than a token amount from the clearing-in fees were to actually reach the Government coffers, but we were grateful that the procedure was completed without fuss or tedious paperwork. At no time did we feel in any way coerced.
    We met cruisers who expressed indignation at the apparent corruption of the system and at what they felt was the obligatory use of an agent to further line the commandante's pockets, but the sums involved are so small and the procedure so user-friendly, we preferred it to the bureaucratic rigmarole one must endure in so-called civilized countries.
    The town of Luperon is an architectural potpourri, a mixture of thatched hovels built from sugar cane, pastel-painted huts of cinder block and plaster with corrugated iron roofs, and, occasionally, a more
substantial building such as the local hotel. The unpaved streets had recently been dug up to accommodate a new water reticulation system, which might one day enrich the lives of Luperon's inhabitants but, in the meantime, added great mounds of earth and mud-filled trenches to the already shambled streets. Scrawny chickens darted hither and thither, little herds of goats grazed in dusty backyards, and plump piglets, tethered outside their owner's houses with long pieces of string, snuffled away at the excavated-soil mountains.
    As we wandered through the town, people smiled and called "Hola" or, now and again, a shy "hello," and we felt safe and welcome. A little girl in a dazzling purple dress hung laundry on a barbed wire fence and grinned broadly for the camera. Outside the thatch-and-sugar cane bar, plump Haitian prostitutes, in ludicrously tight-fitting tank tops and imitation-leather miniskirts, smoked roll-your-owns and eyed me speculatively. I know they were Haitian because the commandante, who had become so friendly with me that he and his staff used my dinghy without asking permission, told me so, emphasizing that Dominican women wouldn't stoop to such activity.
    We had craved fresh and interesting food since leaving George Town. We'd resisted the temptation to restock in Providenciales, where prices were extortionately high, in order to enjoy the bargain basement prices our cruising guide assured us prevailed in Luperon.

    Rucksacks and string bags at the ready, we headed for the supermacardo (a monstrous overstatement) to revel in an orgy of provisioning. A few emaciated chickens, several drums of cooking oil, a bewildering array of soil-encrusted root vegetables and what appeared to be the western world's entire supply of tomato puree in dusty tins left our dream in tatters. We were shattered.
    Where was the cheese, the fresh bread, the crisp lettuce, the succulent fruit, the juicy steaks? Were we condemned to a diet of curried corn beef and beans forever? As we left the store we bumped into Len Daniels, a South African cruiser on his way to England. Over a couple of El Presidente beers in the ramshackle bar of the ramshackle hotel, he advised us to go by bus to Puerta Plata to do our shopping. He assured us that we'd find reasonable quality at good prices.
    Thus mollified, we agreed to meet up that evening for a meal and a few drinks at a local restaurant. And so it was that, over a few glasses of rum and a piece of cooked meat of indeterminate origin, Len told his story.
    He'd built his junk-rigged fiberglass schooner in Durban and intended to sail her to England by way of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Just as he was about to leave, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and rendered the Red Sea route inadvisable. Not to be deterred, Len set off in the opposite direction, heading from Cape Town to Venezuela, where he survived a knife attack, and then on to the Lesser Antilles, losing his foremast on the way.
    The journey to Luperon had been made with the remaining mast, fordespite plunging into the stormy waters, Len had failed to recover the broken spar, which had started life as a fiberglass lamppost in Johannesburg. Len's boat was a monument to minimalism, although not originally by design. It had, for instance, started life with a diesel engine which, in turn, supplied electricity for a range of home comforts. It was the demise of the engine somewhere enroute that had bred in Len the purist ethos. He was a born-again minimalist, who took to the new philosophy with the fervor of his Christian counterparts.
    We were invited to eat aboard Tsai Chen one evening, a concoction of Venezuelan beef, onions, and tomato puree washed down with blue curacao. The following day Carol was quite ill, and I wasn't feeling too hot myself. Len said he thought the beef might have been a bit off because his refrigeration had died with the diesel, although I suspect the blue curacao might also have had something to do with our condition.
    Len continued his voyage and eventually reached Britain, but not without a struggle, as the following article from the Johannesburg Star recorded:
    Disaster-prone sailor back on dry land - Lone sailor Len Daniels has arrived in Britain, two years after setting off from South Africa and five months after leaving the Caribbean on a voyage that should have lasted only four weeks.
    Dogged by a series of disasters on his 14-meter yacht, Daniels had to rig up a makeshift mast using a saucepan and a sail the size of a blanket for most of the 3000- kilometer last leg of his marathon voyage.
    To add to his problems, the steering wheel snapped, and the engine broke down in mid-Atlantic, restricting him to a speed of just one knot. Daniels was down to his last two biscuits and a tin of stew. He eked out his provisions by catching fish and drinking rainwater.
    Coast guards became aware of his ordeal when he fired distress flares after a makeshift tiller snapped two miles off Barry, South Wales. They towed him into port and were amazed at how long he had been at sea.
   Disaster-prone he may have been, but I couldn't help admiring Len's adventurous spirit and sheer grit.