Heading for the Rio Dulce 16:13.1N 87:22.9W

Five Islands
John & Sue
Thu 27 Jun 2013 09:09
It is currently 0400 hours on Thursday morning. We have just had a little over 13 hours of really nice sailing, although the wind is now fading fast and we will have at least 10 or so hours of slow motoring ahead of us. The wind slowly built during the afternoon and around sunset we were seeing boat speeds over 6 knots, but now we are only doing around 3.5 to 4 knots. We will wring as much out of it as we can and then turn on an engine. Arwen has moved ahead of us again as we haven't been able to see their mast head light for an hour or so. Speed isn't a real issue at the moment as we only need to average around 3 knots to arrive at Livingston (the Guatemalan town where we check in after crossing the bar into the Rio Dulce) by 1000 hours Friday morning. The bar is only about 6.5 feet deep at high tide and although this is not a problem for us Arwen draws 6 feet so they cannot cross until midday tomorrow. If we arrive during the night we will have to anchor out the front of the river entrance and we don't really want to do this if possible, although we may need to.

We are currently sailing under a poled out genoa only (a poor sailors spinnaker) as we dropped the main when the wind moved to dead downwind around 1030 hours last night. We had a few storm clouds and some lightning during the early evening but nothing eventuated but we can still see some lightning over towards Belize. We had 2 cruise ships cross in front of us just on sunset as they departed from Roatan heading for Belize and Mexico, but other than that it has been very quiet.

By the way, anyone who feels the urge to send us an email with any news (State of Origin etc) or just to say hello please do so using the fiveislands AT mailasail address. We download them via sat phone so as long as there are no attachments (documents or photos etc) this is not a problem.

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