5/04/01 | Ponce to Salinas

• 4/28-5/1: Ponce
• 5/2: Isla Caja de Muertos (Coffin Island)
• 5/3 : Arrived Salinas

lion around

Ponce is Puerto Rico's second largest city, and unsurprisingly it rates high on the just-like-America scale. We shared a cab to Wal-Mart with Tom and Cindy from Feather, and loaded up on Sam's Choice cookies (my fave!) and Triscuits. We went to the mall to shop at Radio Shack and FootLocker. The grocery stores are stocked with American brands at American prices. (But no more $1 pineapples and ten cent oranges, alas.) We indulged ourselves in a movie (Enemy at the Gates, subtitled in Spanish). It seemed like everyone we met had lived in the US for part of their lives, and spoke far better English than we do Spanish. Fortunately they were all kind and gracious to us ignorant gringos.

We anchored just off the Ponce Yacht Club, where the kind, gracious, and English-speaking secretary informed us that there was a $5 per person per day charge to land our dinghy. Ten bucks a day? No way! Fortunately there is a little wooden dock on the other side of the anchorage, by a boat ramp and a waterfront plaza called La Guancha, where the main attraction is the huge school of tarpon that swim in the shallow water, begging morsels from tourists. Several of the little stores in the plaza sell sardines, and there is always a crowd standing at the rails and along the docks, tossing the little fish into the water to be snapped up by the bigger fish.

One day we bicycled to the historic center of town. There's an elegant plaza there, with a cathedral and a striking red-and-black building that was built for an exhibition in the late 1800's, then became a fire station, and is now a small museum dedicated to Ponce firefighters. Lovely 19th century buildings surround the plaza, and we hoped to find a cafe in one where we could have a nice lunch and do some peoplewatching. We searched for almost an hour. Apparently the Ponceños prefer fast food, because the only choices were Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, and the like. (Burger King appears to be Puerto Rico's dominant fast food chain.) We finally gave up and ate at a food court.

After lunch we went to the Ponce City Museum, housed in a mansion that once belonged to a wealthy doctor, where we learned a bit about the history of Ponce, and incidentally of Puerto Rico. The city is named either for the explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, who was the first governor of Puerto Rico, or for his great-grandson -- nobody knows for sure. The local basketball team, of course, are the Ponce Leones (lions).

We left Ponce for the short run to Isla Caja de Muertos (Coffin Island, after its shape). It was supposed to be a sail, it really was, and we actually managed to sail for about 45 minutes. Then we got away from the wind-bending properties of "mainland" Puerto Rico, and the wind shifted from northeast to southeast, so we turned the key and motored the rest of the way.

Other than the ranger (Caja de Muertos is a state park), we were the only people there. We hiked along the broad and arid trail, surrounded by a thicket of tall, spindly cactus and other thorny scrub, up to the Spanish-built lighthouse on the top of the 200-foot high central hill. The building was barely maintained, rusting metal stairs and crumbling brick and concrete, slowly decomposing in the harsh sun and wind. It's over a century old, but it's probably not going to last into the next.

In the afternoon, we dinghied around to the northern tip of Caja de Muertos and snorkeled on the reefs. Interesting formations and many fish, but either we were out of practice or the fish were unusually skittish (or most probably, both), because we were unable to catch dinner. But we saw Spanish grunts, a new fish for us, and some huge yellowtail snappers and puffer fish. On our way out the next morning, we trolled our lines past the reef, but nothing bit. Good thing we're in the land of grocery stores!

It was a short morning's motorsail to Salinas, a well-protected mangrove harbor where many cruisers leave their boats for hurricane season. We left our boat only for a long weekend; Payless gave us a good 4-day deal on a rental car, so we headed out to explore Puerto Rico by land.