Day 12 Panama to Hawaii

Wow, another 6 days have flown by! And of course you’re all dying to know what we’ve been up to. That’s actually easy to sum up:

1. We slept
2. We ate
3. We sailed for 5 days goose-winged in very light following winds (the Dutch call this “melkmeisje”, milkmaid)
4. Since yesterday the Yanmar has been rumbling away again. Since this morning with the Code 0 up as well. That gives us an extra 0.5 to 1 knot of speed.
5. We have another 2 days of motorsailing to go.

For those with stamina, here’s the long version…

Morale is excellent, despite the heat. Luckily it’s a bit more bearable today. Yesterday everyone was really at the end of their rope. 35.4 degrees Celsius stops being fun. And not a cloud in the sky either. After lunch Rudolf and I spent an hour tending to the sails, and afterwards we were completely knocked “out” by the heat. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so we were allowed a Panamanian beer, which tasted heavenly in the heat. Panamanian beer all turns out to be around 4% alcohol, so nice and light. In the evening it was Arnold’s turn to cook, and he came out of the galley well and truly cooked himself. Unbearable. As I said, today it’s “only” 32 degrees, so already a bit better.

The morning after I wrote the previous post we took a look at the solar panels. Now I understand how, back in the 19th century, layers of guano (bird poo) many metres thick were scraped off islands around here. Good grief, the amount 2-3 birds can poop in a single night. And it was a pain to get off, too. After that we hardly saw them land on the solar panels anymore; it seems they prefer something that’s already white.

Jiminy the cricket is indestructible. I’ve already sacrificed half a can of “Pief Paf” to him. First in the line bin in the cockpit, then the tech room. Last night, after 2 quiet nights, he could suddenly be heard on deck again; I think he’s now in the keel locker. That Pief Paf really ought to work, it’s meant for all crawling insects and the like. It’s made somewhere near Rotterdam, but intended for the Caribbean islands. Seriously carcinogenic, and it usually works perfectly against bugs. I think Jiminy belongs to the Armageddon-surviving variety.

The food. Today we’re on our last factory bread from Panama. Yesterday I was so fed up with it that in the morning I toasted it with a fried egg on top, and at lunchtime made toasted sandwiches with that fake American cheese. Although this one was from Président and claimed to be Cheddar. Hmmmm. Tasty though. So from tomorrow we’ll be baking our own bread. I’m already looking forward to it, fresh bread. For dinner we make something with pasta, rice or beans. Or, and this was a hit: hamburgers with cheese/egg tortilla (the Spanish kind). We’ve got enough left for two more rounds of hamburgers but only one more tortilla. Tonight it’s beans again, with lots of veg, because we sort of forgot about the leeks. A tin of tuna with it I think, onions, tomato sauce, peppers, garlic. In short, we’re actually eating pretty well, but I think in 2.5 weeks’ time I’ll be tucking into a huge American STEAK with enormous gusto!

Weather-wise we can’t complain, because we had 5 days of lovely relaxed sailing with the jib poled out to windward. That works fine as long as the wind doesn’t drop below 9 knots, because then the pressure in the sail can no longer hold the boom in place. And then the speed drops to 3 knots. The forecast also contained lots of thunderstorm warnings. It doesn’t actually say “thunderstorm”, but “CAPE index”, which is a sort of measure of how much energy there is in the atmosphere. But each time there were no clouds worth mentioning nearby, and so no thunderstorms either. We did see lightning almost every night somewhere in the extreme distance (40+ miles), but not near us. Nice. The promised drop in temperature hasn’t materialised yet, but that should happen sometime next week when we also reach the trade winds. Apparently it’s 25 degrees in Hawaii, which sounds just fine to us.

We had one small bit of “fun” on Wednesday morning. I was still in bed and heard a helicopter fly past twice! Some 300 miles offshore? Arnold looked it up, and it turns out to be the spotter helicopter belonging to a Mexican tuna boat. Apparently we were special enough to warrant a good look.

On Thursday the event of the night was Rudolf suddenly being startled awake. A red-billed tropicbird (in Dutch it’s a single word, roodsnavelkeerkringvogel; isn’t Dutch great at stringing words together) was sitting in the cockpit with a fish that didn’t agree with it, or was too big? Either way, it was a filthy mess again the next morning…

Other than that, we’re all getting into the “flow”. I don’t know a good Dutch word for it, and Google Translate also says “flow”. It means the days all blend into one another. We’re no longer quite sure what day it is, and every day is more or less the same. The nice thing is that you don’t “have” to do anything, because you can’t really do anything except keep half an eye on the boat and do the occasional bit of navigation. It helps that the shipping traffic is “dying out”. The day before yesterday the last one disappeared off the screen, and there hasn’t been a ship in sight for 2 days now.

Yesterday we decided to make a small detour to a particular spot on the ocean, but I’ll keep that to myself for now. Those in the know can peek ahead.