And We Slip the Schedule Again

When we left Bocas del Toro in March, we'd been moving steadily for 3 months, and we had a pretty tight schedule laid out for the next few months, before going thru the Panama Canal as planned in July.

We had a bunch of maintenance items piled up that we just hadn't had time to get to. We should have stayed in Bocas for several more weeks to catch up on that kind of stuff. But we just felt that we didn't have the time.

As I looked over our schedule for the next year, I realized that it was very ambitious... a lot of moving, some inland travel, and no boat maintenance time. Also, no 'acclimatization' time... it takes a week or two when you move into a new place, to get the lay of the land, figure out where stuff is and how to find and do what you need. We hadn't figured any of that slop time in our schedule either. Or much 'waiting for weather'. (We have no idea what the weather patterns are over on the Pacific
side).

Finally, I had started looking through Jimmy Cornell's World Cruising Routes book, to validate Dave's original plan to end up in Hawaii after our first season in the Pacific. What I found there was that we needed to GET to Easter Island in February, and not April as was on our current schedule. AND we needed to allow for a considerable amount of 'passage time' in our schedule planning. The trip just to get to Easter takes about 3 weeks.

Another consideration is the timing of the 'inland travel' in South America. We want to avoid 'high season' because of prices and the fact that everything's fully booked, so it's not easy to just show up in a town and find rooms available. And 'low season' in South America is very cold. So there's a 2 month window on either side of winter and summer that are good times for traveling inland.

Another consideration was the timing of our arrival in the Galapagos... if you go when everyone else goes, the anchorages are crowded, the officials are harried, the price of everything goes up, etc. So we wanted to get there a little before everyone else does (March).

The final result of a couple of weeks of talking about it, is that we've slipped the schedule about another 9 months so that we leave for the Galapagos in January. This gives us more time to see Costa Rica and South America, and still fit in a considerable amount of boat maintenance time. We've posted an updated schedule on the website at http://www.svsoggypaws.com/cruisingplans.htm

If any of our friends are interested in trying to join us for any of the inland travel, drop us an email and we'll keep you in mind when we lay out our plans.