Into Panama City
18 November 2017 | Panama City Beach, FL
Capn Andy/Sunny Day
I went below and slept and then came up on the 2 AM watch. The owner who was getting off watch said it was boring. I think differently. The boat seemed to jump to life when I got into the helmseat. We were peeling waves off the bows and leaving them in our wake. I was looking at a peculiar star with the binoculars and one side seemed blurry so I cleaned them. The star turned out to be some kind of aircraft that seemed to hover a long way off. A shrimp boat was off our starboard bow and passed quickly astern. After a while another appeared and I could see his port running light, he was coming across our bows right to left. I headed up to slow the boat and allow him to pass, but he then showed me his starboard running light, he had turned also.
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I now turned 30 to port and continued on that course. We passed starboard to starboard about a mile apart. The catamaran sped up a bit off the wind, but we would go too far left of our planned course, so we headed up again. Still, we maintained 6 and 7 knot,
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When I awoke at about 8 AM, I came up on deck to find no one on the helm. It was the owner’s watch, had he fallen in? I started to make coffee when he came up from the starboard hull. He was cleaning up all over the boat. It was a mess, things that were left during the night were now visible in the light of day. I began making blueberry pancakes with the last of the blueberries, pancake mix, and syrup. We were almost out of milk so water was used with the mix. I had bacon fat reserved and used that to fry the cakes.
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I was on watch again, 11 to 1 PM. The wind was just a gentle breeze now and the sea was smoothing out with a leftover wallop every now and then. Boatspeed was down to the 5‘s and our arrival in Panama City was projected to tomorrow afternoon. This is a good time for the off watch to catch up on sleep. We had two meals planned, I would make salad out of the expiring ingredients and the owner would make his jambalaya out of a prepackaged mix.
We were charging the batteries with the starboard engine at 2000 turns, also providing propulsion. We could go on like this all the way to port. The wind was predicted to drop further and clock around to NW and perhaps increase. We were out of range of the latest NOAA radio weather reports.
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Our ship’s VHF radio didn’t work with whatever antenna it had been hooked up to, so we got a temporary antenna which kind of worked, but the two handheld radios were the ones we were using. The AIS was also detected by the ship’s radio antenna and it is no wonder that it picked up no AIS contacts.
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I searched for the as yet undiscovered mast head VHF antenna cable. We could see where it came out of the mast at deck level, it then went into the front of the cabin. It did not appear in the cable mess behind the nav station panel that mounts the VHF radio. Down in the port hull are mounted a lot of electronics behind doors. I went in there and began looking through loose wires, any coaxial cables in there? Yes, but none of them were the mast head cable. I quit and came up into the cabin. The owner came aft from some chore he was doing on the starboard bow and asked is there something the matter with the autopilot. We then realized the boat was zig zagging all over the place and now about 20 degrees off course. After a lot of trial and error, checking down below that I hadn’t dislodged any important wires, checking the flux gate compass that it had no electrical wiring near it, hand steering and seeing if the autopilot had some unusual forces on the rudder, rebooting the auto pilot, rebooting the whole electronics nav package, finally we had it working again as normal. Our guess is that the balance of the boat running on one engine and an intermittent side wind were causing the auto pilot to oscillate, chasing its tail.
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The Gulf apparently has its moods, now it was as flat as a lake. This is on the 8-11 PM watch. No wind and no waves. Running at 2000 turns and about 6 knots. ETA midmorning tomorrow, Saturday. With the ship’s motion now as steady as when in port I was able to comfortably view stars and constellations with the Cometron binoculars. It is high pressure weather, so no clouds and no light pollution out here at sea. The binoculars needed to have the lens cleaned a bit due to spray on them.
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Now it was my turn to sleep between watches. The boat was gliding along with almost no motion in my bunk. When I awoke to check what time it was, it was an hour past my time due to stand watch. The owner was the one left on deck an hour too long. He said, well, it’s a new time zone, you’re on time. It was true, our phones now had some service and had updated to the new time zone and had downloaded a zillion email.
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We had run over the bar at Cape San Blas, about 20-25 feet of water, no obstacle for a catamaran that draws about 4 feet. We were parallel the coast headed right for the sea buoy for Panama City. The image is the GPS track to the sea buoy.