Moving along nicely

Sunday 27th January

Day 4 and we are now about 60 miles off the coast of Colombia. Light winds, 10-12 kts still from the East but due to go ENE and increase to 13-15 kts later.Very warm, no clouds and very sunny. We are too lazy to change the rig to jib & main and go reaching, so only doing 5 kts SOG at the moment. But we keep saying its not a race!

All is well on board, although I would have happily thrown the entire Raymarine set up into the sea last night, no VHF, no SeaTalk and no plotters which keep flaring when turned down at night. I suspect a fault in the PCB in the SeaTalk box. I hope that I can get it sorted in Colon or Panama City. Otherwise I might just return the whole lot and fit B&G instead.

The new poles for the jibs are working really well. We only pull the control ropes hand tight so as not to load up the poles themselves, or the pole ends.We were flying full jibs in 34 kts of wind a couple of nights ago, everything was well controlled and the boat was flying at up 13.5 kts. Reminiscent of the trip down the Portugese coast.

We hope to arrive in Colon on the 30th - the first canal transit begins on the 2nd Feb, with more on the 4th & 6th. First come first served apparantly. We are going through in 3 bunches of 12 boats which should be good. I will rent the ropes for the handlers rather than cut up the good anchor warl I bought in Portugal and which was used on the Atlantic as a trailing warp to such good effect.

We had fairly busy day yesterday, as we found out about a fishing boat from St Lucia that had sunk. One ARC boat - Tillymint - rescued one crew member but three more were in the water. We heard about it on the radio net when Hugh was WARC controller for the day. Southern Princess, an Aussie boat, told us he with some other WARC boats were standing-by under instruction from the Dutch Coast Guard cutter Jaguar operating out of the Dutch Antilles known as the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao). After the net we made our way and joined in the search about 15.30. Unfortunately we were not successful and we were all stood down at dusk about 18.30. We all rejoined the voyage to Panama.

JR had the fishing lines out yesterday, but had to haul them in again for the searching. Nothing caught. He says he'll try again later today when its cooler and nearer to dusk when the fish seem to bite. We found some really tiny flying fish on deck, only about 1 to 1.5 inches long (25 to 40mm). I dont know haw they got up so high! We also see albatross, flocks of frigate birds, kinds of tern that we havent identified gannets or booby birds and today mother careys chicken otherwise known as the stormy petrel. Hugh spotted very large dolphins. We think they were breaching as they were leaping clear of the water.

We were running the generator on the ARC to charge the batteries for about 10-12 hours per day. The new charging system has halved that, but to make up for that we now run it to power the air conditioner. It really is a blessing in these hot conditions, especially with the galley heat as well.

Food on board is an interesting challenge. We have managed not to repeat the same meal yet - although we have only been at sea for 4 days! Due to the short passage we do not have the complex arrangement of nets for hanging the fruit and vegetables. This makes the saloon area a lot more comfortable and user friendly. We will try not to repeat the net experience. The fridge and freezer are working well. Today we will have sweet chilli stir fry pork and vegetables for dinner. Val is busy at the moment making bread with buttermilk substitutes.