Diving in the best of waters
Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Wed 13 Feb 2013 15:19
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Hallo and thank you for all wonderful mails about
the Fisher Panda (Generator) work.
Some are astonished that the technical matters are
so challenging. I got a mail from our DP Dag Engström giving a good
thought.
His life long experience is both from
cargoships and sailing boats and he gave us a good picture of the world today in
the commercial business. If we understood him right, work is in a way less
challenging on the bridge, where navigation and watch is aided by new technology
(no sextant anymore). But the chief engineer has more challenges than ever to
keep the ship going. It is easy to imagine that engineering today is all about
automation, computeraided technology all the way into the engine room. Now we
are far from a commercial vessel but in a way it feels like we have the same
picture. All the help we have from technology is fine as long as it works, the
problem is that we have to use the time we save on running technology to solve
problems where the technology does not work. There is a saying I love: I good
tool does half the job, a bad makes you crazy.
As you can imagine, while we where crawling in the
engine room, the autopilot/plotter/AIS etc does the work for us
upstairs.
And as I said earlier there is no difference
between old and new stuff, actually we have more problems in "boxes" that are
hard to fix with new technology than the old stuff that is in the open air and
looks less sophisticated.
Let's move over to funnier business. The day before
yesterday we met the family on board Chilli Cat, Hetha, Charles and their
children Luca and Isabella. They dive as well and offered to take care of
our children while we went diving and we could do the same for
them.
GREAT! So we rented the whole pile of stuff and
almost sank the dinghy. Left Erika and Andreas with them and made a really
good dive just behind our boat.It was great to be just the two of us strolling
around the reef and enjoyng one fish after the other.
After lunch Chilli Cat offered to take their boat
to a diving site with us all on it and we went with their great great catamaran
over to Petit Bonair. They started off and we watched the boat and the
kids. As they came up with big smiles on their faces we went down with big
expectations. And it could not be better! Great corals, big ridges of them.
Among thousands of fishes just to mention some of what we saw: A turtle on real
close encounter, Baracudas (one mean machine that looked like it wanted to
eat us), tunas and one swam right up to my google, murrays, I give up, the
list would be long long.
New plans
As we talked to Hetha and Charles we realize
Columbia is a place to visit. It is safe nowadays and it would cut our trip to Panama in half. So we are looking at St
Marta Columbia as our next leg. When we are leaving? Well it looks good right
now but we have not decided yet. What we have decided is that we will skip
Curasou and Aruba in favour of more time here. Everybody keeps saying this is
the best place of the ABC islands.
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