11 June 2011

10/11 june 2011
Man, it feels good to be back at sea. After a good night's sleep, we slipped anchor at 6am, at one point wondering whether we were going to bring someone else's chain up with ours. However, all was good and we sneaked out of the anchorage. Even by 8am it was hot and we were regularly dipping into the ice we had bought with us. Absolutely no wind (you may think there's a pattern here, but hold that thought!) and so just motoring out of Panama. At this time of year (and quite a lot of the year) the wind is on the nose to the Galapagos, so it's going to be a slow old trip. Nevertheless, as I said, it's so lovely to be not rushing around and just putting away and tying down last minute things. We felt that the engines weren't keeping up their usual speed. After deciding it probably had a lot to do with the barnacles and other growth on the bottom of our boat, we made a little detour to Las Perlas, a group of islands in the bay of Panama to drop anchor for a couple of hours and scrub away the worst of it. So by 5.30pm we were off again, thinking we were in for a gentle motor through the night. How wrong were we?! First, we had a boat's length of fishing line/wire hook itself onto our anchor. After congratulating ourselves on detaching it from said anchor without fouling the prop we had our second test of the night. Our first foray into the world of lightening storms took us completely by surprise, as there was nothing we could see that was forecast other than light/no wind. Mark didn't even have time to gut the two fish he had just caught using his new lures, before we were lifejacketed up and tied on, with an introductory gust of 50 knots, we estimated. We didn't know for sure as we had already disconnected all the antennae and turned off all battery power. As Mark said it wasn't a matter of if we were hit, it was more likely to be when we were hit. There was so much thunder and lightening right on top of us, if we weren't the tallest metal object in the area, I would have been mightily impressed. I was mightily impressed we got away with two hours of lightening and no hits and thankful that the kids slept through the whole excitement. Also, that the sea was completely flat throughout, due to the torrential rain.
This morning, we are back to no winds and a little cloud cover and have enjoyed about 20 birds joining us on the boat that are so tame we could touch them (we had to as they were so inept at walking, we had to rescue them when they got stuck between our jerry cans! ) dolphin displays and a pod of about 6 pilot whales lumber past our boat. We've also seen whole trees float past us with birds perching on the horizontal trunk! The other birds have been with us for hours now, to the point where the kids are actually now ignoring them and have gone back to reading!! This is a long blog - I hope it goes through OK on snailmail. More again soon, love Cath xx