With the boat fully fueled (including an extra 40 gallons in jerry cans) and our passports properly stamped we aimed to wake up nice and early and sail to Las Perlas. After all, for the last week we’ve had a near on constant 15-20 knot wind from the north. What could go wrong?
At 6am there was no wind. There was not much at 7am. Approaching 8am we decided to go for it. The anchor windlass breaker was the next thing to die after the wind. No problem – we raised it by hand. No matter that the spares recently received had the wrong sized lugs, we weren’t going to hang around another day. Then the chart plotter froze. Not once, but twice, requiring power cycling to restore functionality. Minor stuff really.
Soon we were off motor sailing in 8-10 knots of wind. We put four lines off the back having heard the fishing was good. The wind was lousy for our standard rig so it was an opportune time to crank out the Code Zero that had been in for repair. No problems this time. Up it went and it looked good. We were soon doing 4-5 knots in 8-10 knots of wind. For a while we turned the motors off. But the wind was tired of blowing for the last two weeks and died down to nothing at one point. We used the electric motors on batteries to assist us keeping a half decent ETA to Isla Contadora running the genset to recharge from time to time. The last two hours we ran the genset continuously to get us in.
On the upside we caught a 5.5lb tuna/jack. Having let John watch my land and prepare the previous catch (the barracuda on the way to San Blas) it was his turn. Tuna (maybe it’s some sort of jack are nowhere near as smelly so it was a good baptism for him. We’re going to eat it tonight. We’re having trouble properly identifying it – if any readers know for sure, please comment and let us know. We’ve heard that the jacks that look a bit like this but have spots on the belly aren’t so good to eat. In fact, we caught one of those too – about 3lb – which we let go. We’ll find out later I guess.
After arriving and anchoring in over 50ft of water I set about the windlass breaker. I discovered that the spares we’d ordered were correct. Our had an extension lug screwed over the top of the smaller lugs. Once I figured this out the replacement went ok. The GPS worked it’s gremlins out. I’m pretty sure it was down to the sheer number of AIS signals in an around the end of the canal. It looks like there is a repeater somewhere because we could see ships all through the canal and around Colon. Now that they’ve all gone things are good.
We also ran into Everafter who are here but leaving soon – before we can get together. Perhaps another time as they’re heading roughly our way including up to Costa Rica.
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