Panama to Galapagos - Noon position fourth day (Monday 8th March)

Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Mon 8 Mar 2010 19:26
We're definitely into the area of lighter winds now. The northerly winds (that spill over from thew Caribbean side) have died and we are into light and variable winds. Last night the wind dropped and we were sailing at only 3 to 4 kts a lot of the time, until it died completely. The engine then went on at low revs for 4 hours, keeping us going albeit at only 4kts or so. The daily run was 122 miles. Not as good as the previous 2 days, but not bad considering the light winds.
The wind is now 10-12kts from the east and we're heading just west of south. This puts the wind on our beam (we go faster that way) and we're making between 5 and 6kts. We hope this will continue so we can get down well below the ITCZ. We then hope we'll pick up the southerly winds to take us west. currently there is not a cloud in the sky, so it's bright sunshine.

>From the mess that was left behind, it looks like we had a flock of seagulls roosting under the solar panels on the back of the boat last night. Neither of us saw anything, but we weren't looking - we will tonight!

Before leaving Panama, we registered on the Internet to receive Tsunami warnings from NOAA. If there is a warning, they send out an email with all the details. It's only any good of course if we regularly look at our emails. We try to look each day and have had 2 earthquakes warnings from NOAA so far, one off the cost of central Chile and the other in Indonesia. Both were small earthquakes and they only expected the local area to be affected. But it is reassuring that the registration was successful and information is coming through.

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