Welcome to Aruba

Internet was not working at the Curacao Marina Monday morning. Typical. We filed our water tanks, settled our account with the marina, and set sail. We had good winds behind us, so directly behind us we had to tack to reach maximum speed and keep our sails full. We were buzzed by a low flying coast guard plane which turned around and headed back toward Curacao after he buzzed us.

Sailing was very comfortable. Nice winds, pleasant temperature, sailing along with the swells. Due to our position from tacking, we passed Aruba on the north side then circled around to our intended anchorage on the south side, just past the end of the island, where the hotels are. We arrived just after dark.

Out of nowhere, a small coast guard vessel spotlighted us and pulled along side. They asked permission to board (I’m sure if you say no they won’t just go away) so we lowered the main sail and three men came aboard in full uniforms with weapons. They were very inquisitive, even a little nosy. They asked if we had checked in, which we had not. We told them we had just arrived and planned to check in first thing in the morning, so we wouldn’t have to navigate into a strange port at night. They thought it would be a good idea for us to check in now. Right now. We were surprised that immigration and customs would be open at 9:00pm but they wanted to provide special service just for us. To help us along, they would stay on board with us. They inspected all of our documents, which were in order, and having a curious nature they asked if they could look around. I would call the look-see more of an inspection. They looked so closely, I suspected they might want to buy Living The Dream.

They asked if we had any guns, drugs or anything else we’d like to declare. They were not interested in Juice Plus, Fish Oil, Low Dose Aspirin or Probiotics. We were sorry to disappoint them. We didn’t mention our duty-free toilets which were still in boxes. The toilet boxes might as well have been filed with cocaine because they attracted no attention. I suggest if you ever do want to smuggle cocaine, stash it in toilet boxes on the deck, nobody will want to look in there.

We pulled into a dock intended for freighters so it was a challenge to tie up protect LTD. A van was waiting for us. We were only asked to fill out some standard immigration forms, they took our passports, then took Joel away for some customs formalities, returned him and our passports and “the yellow flag is down, you are free to go.” I didn’t see any yellow flag. At least they saved us the trouble of checking in Tuesday morning.


We sailed a little ways down the beach and found a nice quiet spot between two party bars (two different bars blaring music do not cancel each other out) and set anchor. After a light dinner we retired for the evening. Cool breezes, gentle rocking motion, no rain on my feet.

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