Got up at midnight, weighed anchor, and left the harbor by radar. The wind was scarcely blowing at all, so we made good time motoring east. Everything went well for a change, and we reached Luperon around ten in the morning.
What a lovely harbor! It's completely surrounded by green hills, so there's excellent protection here. We were surprised to see about thirty other sailboats peacefully sitting at anchor.
We were told over the VHF to go to the dock to clear in, so we did. It's a long, sturdy cement dock. The officials came to the boat, instead of us having to find their offices. First customs cleared the boat, and then immigration checked our passports. A man on the dock provided yacht services, including diesel, so we ordered thirty gallons, thinking he'd bring it by truck. To our surprise, he brought a fifteen-gallon container of diesel on a moped. Then he went back and got another fifteen-gallon container. He set a container on a high bollard, attached a siphoning hose to it, started the suction by mouth (ugh!), and filled our jerry jugs. The diesel cost $1.75 a gallon, which wasn't bad considering the diesel was delivered.
We took the boat out to the anchorage, ate lunch, and took a nap. Then we paddled to the dock to go to town. We were surprised by the lack of accommodation for dinghies. There was a rusty ladder from the dock to the water, and a bunch of dinghies were clustered around it, but there was no good place for our Royaks. We had to pull them up on mud-covered coral and tie them as best we could. The armed guard on the dock demanded $3 to watch them, which I felt was a rip-off, but Roy paid him.
Even though the harbor here is beautiful, the village is strictly third world. It is as poverty-stricken as the poorest places in Mexico and Costa Rica. If traveling to places like this does nothing else for you, it certainly makes you thankful you had the amazing good fortune of having been born in the United States.
Surprisingly, Luperon has nice, smooth cement sidewalks, but the streets are unpaved. A lot of people ride around on mopeds, and some have pickup trucks. I kept wondering where they got the money to buy them. We also saw a couple of men riding burros and some kids on beat-up bicycles. All the people are very pleasant, friendly, cheerful, and apparently happy. We walked the entire length of the town and saw a few fairly nice houses, but most are thatch-roofed shacks. There is nothing we would consider a real grocery store -- just some hole-in-the-wall type places with a very limited stock. We bought a few potatoes, onions, oranges, a dozen eggs, and a pineapple. The pineapple was very good, but poor Roy had a hard time eating it due to his sore lip.
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