Nice morning, not so good afternoon 16:01.5N 084:43.4W

Five Islands
John & Sue
Tue 25 Jun 2013 00:18
Sailing conditions were quite good this morning, after sailing all night with genoa only we raised the mainsail at 6am and set out to catch up with Jens and Dani on Arwen. They had managed to move ahead of us by 9 nm during the night. We had got within 3nm when we had to drop all sails due to some really impressive thunderstorms which hit around 3pm. Plenty of rain, lightning and thunder, the rain was welcome as the boat needed a good wash down but the lightning we could have done without. A couple hit way too close to us but missed fortunately. You tend to feel a bit exposed when you have a 60 foot aluminum mast sticking up in the air in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Just as the storm was dying out a Honduran fishing boat changed course and headed directly for us and then stayed about half a mile from us for about 20 minutes or so. There have been a few incidents along this coast over the years which is why a lot of boats travel together on this route. We called Jens and Dani but they had motored ahead to try to get away from the storms and were about 10nm away. The fishermen must have got bored as they eventually moved away back onto their original course. So now we are slowly motoring along waiting for the wind to come back because the storms seemed to have sucked all of the wind out of the place.

We finally wet the fishing lines this morning and were successful in catching lots of seaweed and nothing else.

We are currently a little over half way from Providencia to Guatemala, but the forecast is for much lighter winds from now on so it will take a bit longer to do the remaining 240 or so miles. We would like to cross the bar into the Rio Dulce on Thursday morning if possible.