Leaving for Ecuador
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sun 10 Feb 2008 16:22
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08:54.785N 79:31.288W
We are leaving Panama today (Sunday, 2/10) and will
sail along Colombia (don't worry, we will be more than 50 miles away from the
coast) to Ecuador. We will be crossing the equator on this trip and we
want to assure all of you engineers out there that we do plan to flush the
toilet while crossing the equator and then again when we are in the
southern hemisphere in order to prove or disprove that age old tale concerning
the direction in which the water swirls (no swirl, just straight down over the
equator; then opposite swirl direction once in the southern
hemisphere). These are the important things we worry about.
We have a bottle of champagne ready for the equator crossing as well - just
in case anyone was concerned about our ability to celebrate the
event.
Don has determined that the trip will take us 4
days and 21 hours. We'll see how well he does with this prediction.
We expect the wind to be light and the seas to be fairly calm, so it should be
an easy trip with probably more motoring than we would like. And it will
be hot. As a matter of fact, the ten days that we have spent in
Panama have been nothing less than sweltering. Showering during the day is
hopeless as two minutes in the sun causes one to completely
wilt. We basked in the beauty of air conditioning the couple of times we
went to the local mall for groceries. Night is a different story. As
soon as the sun goes down, the air is balmy and warm, usually with a nice breeze
blowing. We really can't complain, but we have experienced a whole new
dimension of 'hot' here in Panama and expect more of the same in
Ecuador.
My brother Bill and I (and sometimes Don) did some
sightseeing in Panama and I have a collection of pictures and stories to
share, but unfortunately our internet source (Bennigan's) has been down for the
past couple of days so the Panama entries with pictures will have to wait until
we get to Ecuador where hopefully high speed internet will be waiting for
us. In the meantime, we'll send daily updates via the satellite phone as
we make our way to Ecuador. I'll try not to include any pictures of Don's
underwear hanging in the sun as the last time I did that there was quite a bit
of controversy. We received a fair amount of email - some professing love for
the picture and some professing outrage (or maybe pretended
outrage).
More tomorrow from the lovely Pacific.
Anne
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