May 6 - May 8, 2014
We checked out of Yap on the morning of our departure. The Yap officials would not permit us to check out late the afternoon before and leave at the crack of dawn, as we had wanted to. So we had to wait until their office opened at 8am to check out. But it was done quickly and painlessly and without cost. We made one last stop at the grocery store--hoping that tomatoes would have magically appeared on the shelves. But alas, we had to make our passage tomato-free.
As seems to have been the pattern during our whole trip across Micronesia, we left port on another long passage with the promise of wind that never materialized.
And also true to form, Dave didn't want to drift along in the light winds, so we motored a lot of the way to Palau.
The entire trip was pretty uneventful. We spent most of the second day with passing squalls and doing the zero-to-25-to-zero squall "two step". But about midnight that day, the final squall passed and our last 12 hours was pretty good.
The whole passage was 260 miles, from the anchorage in Yap to the commercial wharf in Palau. It took us 53 hours, and we motored 31 hours of that.
Our check-in in Palau was pretty hassle-free. We tied up to the commercial wharf at 1pm, and by about 3pm, we were completely done. The whole thing cost $150 U.S. And as Americans, we have a year in Palau before we need to worry about a visa extension. (Non-Americans get 1 month, extendable to 3 at a cost of about $100 per month).
By 3:30pm we were on the Guest Mooring off Sam's Tours, and by 5pm we were enjoying a nice cold draft Red Rooster beer (great German beer brewed in Palau) at the bar at Sams. Hot showers, nice dinghy dock, etc.
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At 05/08/2014 9:17 PM (utc) our position was 07°20.32'N 134°27.17'E
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