Sailing away from Panama and Las Perlas

Exocet Strike
John & Stella Dyer
Fri 13 Feb 2015 19:36
We're on our way again, whohoo. After a few great days on the Las Perlas Islands, mostly around Contadura we have set sail again as a fleet bound for Galapagos.
You may notice from our tracker that many of us are heading more south than direct, reason is that the winds should be better for us this way, the perceived wisdom is to sail south and not cross the equator until 084 deg west. The weather info we have seems to confirm this, however since we are crossing the ITCZ, or doldrums, an area where there can often be little wind one minute and a near gale with lots of rain another, we need to keep our wits about us.
One of our fleet sent out a group message to say they had just seen a 40 foot whale, must have been close to us, but we never saw it. Ditto another boat saw another whale about 10 mins later.
Brian and Dain have just sighted Dolphins around our boat, and we saw a turtle about an hour ago, so lots of life around here.
John