Patrick Schulte and his family just reached Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic on Bumfuzzle, their 1986 Grand Banks 42, continuing their cruising life in the Caribbean. When we last checked with them, they were in the Caymans at the start of the year. Since then they’ve gone down to Jamaica, and then over to the DR.
It took the Schultes, Pat, his wife Ali, their daughter Quest, 10, and son, Lowe, 8, about 48 hours to go from Port Antonio, Jamaica, to Santo Domingo. They waited for a three-day weather window, and then left early in the morning, helped by a two-knot favorable current that had Bumfuzzle “humming along” at more than 10 knots.
Pat and Ali have already sailed around the world, and they’re pretty set on their cruising lifestyle. “Non-cruisers often envision what it will be like on a passage,” Pat wrote on their blog, bumfuzzle.com. “They’ll bake bread, spend hours learning a new language on that app they haven’t opened, or maybe even pick up a guitar and teach themselves how to play. Reality is so much different. I have yet to meet the cruiser who has the energy to do any of these things while on a passage. Even a short two-day passage leaves you feeling listless. About the only productive thing we can ever manage to do is read.”
The Schulte family has been cruising on Bumfuzzle since they bought it in Florida in September, 2017, and they know what they need underway. The totality of navigation equipment: an iPad. No AIS, no radar, no chartplotter. They want to keep it “simple and efficient,” particularly in the Caribbean. You just need to be able to read the lights on ships you run across at night, he says.
When they reached Santo Domingo, they were surprised by the debris floating in the harbor. The marina even had a floating barrier to keep it from piling up (see picture above). And they definitely had to make do with shore power. “Our 50A power cord is run to a splice with another boat’s 30A that then runs into a standard extension cord and wall outlet, providing each boat just enough power to charge a laptop without blowing a fuse,” he wrote. They were glad they installed solar panels on the flybridge hardtop.
Still, they are enjoying the DR. “The marina guards are super friendly, offering us help with anything we could possibly need.” The kids drew flags of the DR, as they do in every country they visit, and started visiting local museums and artists.
One evening they were walking back to the marina at night and “a police officer came running up behind us and kindly asked where we were heading. ‘Aaaah. La Marina,’ he said with a big smile. He clearly thought we were lost and headed in the wrong direction away from town.”
Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, Pat and Ali have been traveling since they quit their jobs in Chicago in 2003. (He was a commodities trader.) He now runs his financial writing business from the boat, living a life that many people dream about but very few ever achieve. Read more:
