Bahamas --Dominican Republic 2006

We sailed down towards Georgetown which we'd heard was a favourite yachtie haunt. We turned into the harbour and found over 400 yachts on anchor. It was really a sight to see. At night it was like a forest of masts with lights on. It was our first real experience with a big cluster of cruisers. There were a lot of activities being organised daily. We had arrived just in time for coconut week. We decided it steer clear of coconut activities but played a lot of volleyball and spent a lot of time getting to know other cruisers.
We also had a wonderful meal on a mega-yacht. The Kiwi crew had not seen Kiwis for a very long time and were delighted to entertain us with the owners leftovers.
Around mid-March it was time to move on. We arrived back on the yacht one afternoon and decided the wind was favourable, so we put up the spinnaker and said "let's see how far we can get with this wind". A couple of days later we were talking about pulling into the Turks and Cacos to check out of the Bahamas, only to realise that island did not belong to the Bahamas. We were too far down the chain to turn back, so decided that at the next port we would fill out our leaving documentation and posted back to them. A few days of sailing later the weather picked up and we decided we'd better to look for somewhere to go in. Out came the chart and we decided on a little place in the Dominican Republic called Luperon. We expected this to be a sleepy little backwater with a few fishing boats. However, when we came round the corner there are a hundred yacht in there. We had called another yacht to help guide us past some reefs and had given them our name. As we came round the corner we heard on the radio call "Cool Bananas Cool Bananas Stooooop"as we rode straight into a sand bar doing 4 kn . The cruiser guide we had been using was five years old and the sand bar had moved from one side of the channel to the other!!
We had decided to stay in Luperon from a couple of days while the inclement weather went past (turned into 11 days). Luperon boasted a small marina and a very new yacht club. It was very cheap to provision at and we found some cruisers who had arrived for five days were still here three months later. The picture with the rainbow was taken from the back of Cool Bananas and is a shot over the harbour. However it does not show the water's true colour. It was green.
Checking into the Dominican Republic was interesting. We had to see the Port Captain, the Navy, the meat inspector, the veg inspector, customs, immigration, and anyone else who they thought we needed to see.
One thing we did find was that the people there while quite poor, seemed very happy.