1:37.41N
86:49.58W
Wednesday 6th June – En Passage to the Galapagos Islands
Having completed a few bits of boat maintenance – which inevitably
take longer than they ought – and done some final stocking up in Panama City we slipped our mooring at around midday on
Friday 1st June bound for the Galapagos
Islands where we will collect Chris Austin for the 3,000 NM trip
from there to the Marquesas.
Inevitably he is bringing a bag full of spares of one sort or
another. This part of the journey
is, of course where it all starts getting serious from the point of view of
spare parts. Until we get to NZ or
Oz, either we can make do with what we have or, probably, we’ll have a
significant issue to resolve.
Fingers crossed!
Final provisioning in Panama City was made considerably easier by the
fact that we’d discovered on the internet the 2008 advice given by Frank and
Shirley of S/V Windsong, on the subject.
Of course, you can get pretty much anything you’d like in Panama City. The question is “How and where?” The answer was by using Taxi Tony whose
vehicle is a battered old van (definitely not the regulation yellow of a
‘proper’ taxi). He can do the
normal here-to-there runs but is best used as a driver/guide/interpreter. For
this he charges $10 an hour for the whole deal. Generally speaking that’s much cheaper
than the equivalent taxi fare and the time it saves you, Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms/Whatever
Unfamiliar-with-Panama, is anybody’s guess. But, it has to be very appreciable. Tony has been doing this for a long time
for yotties and knows the score.
So, over the course of a couple of trips we managed to refill a propane
gas cylinder (to do that quickly you need to drive half way back to Colon), a
sub-aqua air cylinder, finish off the grocery shopping and mount a successful
assault on both the fruit market and a most impressive hardware store.
Having
finished all that and slipped our mooring at the Balboa Yacht Club, we made our
way SW to clear the approach to the Canal and around Amador Island to anchor briefly to the east of
its causeway. A quick snorkel
around the boat showed that, as we’d suspected, it was going to be well
worthwhile diving with compressed air and getting rid of a zillion barnacles
that had begun to colonize the flatter areas of the hull, the propeller, prop
shaft, water intakes and anywhere else the little monkeys felt they could
usefully make mischief. That
and getting rid of the slime on the waterline took about half an hour and we
were off.
The
approximately 900 NM trip SW from Panama to the Galapagos
Islands is frequently a difficult trip for yachts. There is often very little wind for much
of the passage and given a small amount of swell, very light winds are of little
use. So, how far can you motor if
you need to? Many a more modern
cruising boat would come up with a more comforting answer than Arnamentia. But then, some more modern cruising
boats might be said to have auxiliary sails rather than auxiliary engines. Because, in the Med . . . .
Arnamentia carries about 360 litres of fuel in her tanks and we
supplemented that with another 140 litres in plastic jerry cans strapped to the
guardrail. So, around 500 litres in
all. With a bit of luck and running
the engine at around half revs we could make about 6 knots in flat calm water
and perhaps make something over 700 NM before we were out of fuel. We’d make less distance and speed in
swell or against an unhelpfully weak head wind – weak enough to be useless;
strong enough to be a nuisance. One
way or another, motoring the whole way was not an option. The various sources of weather
information showed a general pattern of no wind at all in the vicinity of
Panama, a light westerly flow a couple of hundred miles down track backing to
southerly quite well north of the Equator.
So, once we’d got to the wind we had a wind bend clearly inviting us to
sail to the inside of the curve, starting off heading more or less for the
destination on starboard tack, accepting a continuous heading wind shift and
finally tacking to port once we could fetch it on that tack. Things got a bit more involved than that
because there was a band of heavy rain hundreds of miles wide and around 100 NM
from north to south lying along the track.
It really was not practical to try to avoid it and anyway, there would be
wind there. The early stages of the
voyage involved motoring continuously for the first 18 hours and a mix of
motoring and sailing on Saturday and into Sunday morning. On Sunday afternoon we hit the rain belt
and we were in that for the next two days – full oilskins albeit with bare
feet. By the bye, Mr Musto, Henri
Lloyd etc what about breathable oilskin shorts (maybe plus 2’s)? It’s all I’d have wanted in addition to
a jacket for such a continuous period of rain in these latitudes. And, how stylish!
As
each mini system within the overall belt (‘squall’ if you will but we’re not
talking very strong winds here – Force 4 or 5) passed through, the wind backed
to SSW and then veered to around NNW.
That made for a wet and busy couple of days with continual course changes
and tacks to try to ensure that we continued to head in some sort of useful
direction. But, at least we were
under sail – if a bit tired, damp and bedraggled by the end of it. Life would have been easier had Orville
the autohelm behaved better when asked to steer to a given wind angle. But, he kept losing the plot and so had
to be told to steer a constant compass course in a shifting wind. Which meant, of course, that we had to
keep altering the course he was being told to steer. Which you can’t do without clambering up
the companionway, into the forward cockpit, across the bridge deck, into the
after cockpit and then manoeuvring yourself around the wheel. In the completely vertical, heavy
tropical rain. Hm.
There
has been virtually nothing to see on this passage – not a single other vessel –
only a couple of frigate birds and a few flying fish which have landed in the
cockpit, and of course the endless, grey sea. Books have been read and iPods listened
to. Meals have been somewhat
haphazard, mainly pre-prepared frozen ones reheated in the sloping galley – note
to purser – next time stock the freezer up with the things you want first on the
top!
By Tuesday afternoon we’d very largely sailed out of the rain belt
and got far enough south (getting towards 2ºN) to pick up the more
constant southerly winds. We’ve
been sailing very steadily SW under reefed main and yankee since then and
averaging around 6 knots – maybe a bit more. Why reefed? Because one of the Fredricksen mainsail
batten cars decided yesterday that enough was enough and fell apart on us. We can’t replace that until Chris Austin
arrives. So, we’ve hoisted the
mainsail with 2 reefs in it to get above the bottom batten. As at 1000 this morning (1600 BST) we
had about 250NM to run and much more diesel (around 365 litres) than we
need. So, that’s OK then. Might not bother refuelling in the
Galapagos Islands given that it’s apparently
quite difficult and pretty expensive.
