Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Still Sitting in Panama City

Yep, here we are again 'waiting for weather'.

We finally got all our critical repairs done by last Saturday. Now we've been waiting out an unusual bout of high winds, I think caused by tropical activity in the Western Caribbean. Gosh I miss Chris Parker.

However, I am finally accumulating enough weather links to feel like I have all the weather available to me as a layperson. And starting to feel like I know what is 'normal weather'.

We think we have a window to get around Punta Mala (Bad Point in Spanish) coming up on Saturday/Sunday. So we plan to leave here tomorrow and make 2 day-hops to get positioned for a rounding of Punta Mala on Saturday. All the anchorages we've selected are kind of iffy... open roadsteads that should be protected enough for a rolly overnight anchorage. But we're not sure. The guidebooks don't cover this part of the coast (from Panama City direct to Punta Mala) because, coming in the other direction,
the advice is to go via the Las Perlas islands, to totally avoid rounding Punta Mala at all. But that doesn't make sense for us, because it would add about 90 miles to our windward journey.

So if we get to one of our selected anchorages and it is totally untenable, we'll just have to gut it out, keep going, or go back.

The good news is that it has been mostly sunny and cooler here the last few days. The winds have been really gusty in the 15-20 range. It's a nice change from hot, humid, rainy, and zero wind. It kinda feels like fall.

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