Cuba On the Rocks

The sudden jolt and the sound of fiberglass grinding on rock instantly told me that this grounding was not like the others we’d experienced. I could look straight down into crystal-clear water and see sharp edged rocks sprouting branches of hard corals, rather than the turtle grass or sand that had surrounded our boat in previous groundings. Ordinarily this would have been a beautiful sight—one of the things we seek out in our cruising adventures— but now my knees went weak when I realized that Threepenny Opera, our trusty Catalina 42, was now hard aground in the middle of an uncharted reef.

My wife, Pat, and I had headed east from Varadero, Cuba, on a 180-mile eastbound jaunt toward Marina Cayo Guillermo, where we were to clear out of the country. Our objective was to take soundings to supplement the scant details in existing charts and to chart some new