One thing I’ve neglected to mention in the recent blogs is the increase in night time phosphorescence. Our last night around Isla Jesuita was particularly amazing as the waters around us were absolutely flat. We could see the trails of fish swimming in the water around us. Just the act of spitting in the water would create a primary flash and secondary sparkles around. Taking a pee of the back step was like waving a sparkler around.
Yesterday morning continued to be flat, calm and windless. We kept to our plan of moving Dignity close to the ferry dock and dropping John/Ella off via Dinghy. In hindsight, with the waters so flat it would have been easier just to dinghy them over from where we were anchored. We couldn’t have been sure about that though and we didn’t want to send them off wet following a mile’s dinghy ride through choppy waters.
We said our Au Revoirs to Ella and headed off perhaps to meet again in Australia. The waters were so flat and the air windless it was back to motoring. With no rush to get to our next stop we decided to find a more optimal way to motor the boat. We kept the motor power consumption down to a total of 75A which kept us moving around 4.5 knots versus the 6 to 6.5 we would normally motor at. We learned that at this speed we needed to only run the genset for a third of the time giving us an approximate doubling of fuel efficiency. This fits nicely with our plans to only motor when our speed over ground is below 3 to 3.5 knots on our longer passages. The nice thing about the hybrid system is we can augment the boat speed (say from 2 to 4 knots) by using a small push from the batteries over a long period of time and only run the genset when it’s time to give the batteries a solid charge. A 4 knot speed over ground will ensure we cover around 100nm per day which will get us through the doldrums in a decent time. This is our biggest weather obstacle ahead of us which I want to get through reasonably quickly but without burning too much fuel.
We also calibrated the speed log. The flat conditions were ideal for this. I ignored the built in recalibration the unit has and simply motored a square taking readings of the measured speed through water and the speed over ground from the GPS. Once each reading was taken we would turn to port 90 degrees, wait for the readings to settle down and repeat. The speed through water reading, as expected, remained constant but the GPS readings varied due to local currents. Averaging the SOG and dividing by the measured speed through water gave me the ratio by which I had to compensate the speed log. The speed log was already compensated once before so I had to multiply the two for a new setting. Seemed to work.
We arrived at Bahia Leona in time for lunch. This bay is just north of Bahia Herradura and we wanted to test it out as a possible stop when Ben and Jess are with us. After lunch we went and snorkeled on the reef but were again disappointed by the murkiness of the water. That was enough for us to decide not to come here again. Despite the crowds it looks like our best option is to take Ben and Jess back to Islas Tortugas for the one day we’ll have to spend snorkeling/diving (according to our current plan).
Not having any reason to stay (ie, no access to internet) we again used our new motoring strategy to head around to Bahia Herradura. With the lessons learned from the morning I was able to time the start up of the genset so we would arrive with the drive batteries acceptance down to 60A. We had planned a wash later in the day and when using the genset to provide on board power the driving bank charging is capped at 60A so this would mean we would get good use of the additional generator time.
Our first stop in Bahia Herradura showed many open internet connections but I failed to get traffic on any so we shifted the boat nearer to our location from a week ago. Here we found a good open connection and settled down.
We decided to eat out for the evening. The downside of this was that low tide was at 6pm. That meant we had a long dinghy haul up the muddy beach before we could chain the dinghy to a tree. We had a very pleasant meal ashore. At the same time we learned what we needed about the bus schedule between here and Jaco.
Ben and Jess are on their way here today. Their flight left Newark 4 minutes late (that’s pretty good going really) and is currently due to land in Costa Rica one minute early. John and Ella will be at the airport then. Her flight leaves two hours later so there’s a chance they’ll all meet up. They’ll catch either the 2pm or 3pm bus from San Jose that will drop them off in Herradura 2 hours and 20 minutes later. It’s a short taxi ride to the beach from there. Fingers crossed and they’ll be here in time for Friday night curry.
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