Since sitting in this nice quiet anchorage, and getting ready for a big passage, we have been participating daily in the Panama Pacific Net every day.
This is a sleepy little net--hard to keep going during the off season, because everyone has either left to go across the Pacific, transited through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean side (which has it's own net), or are sitting in Balboa Panama, or Golfito, Costa Rica (both are 'black holes'), or have stashed their boat in Ecuador and are off traveling.
But it's almost Pacific Crossing Time, so boats are starting to move. There's a whole slug of boats waiting out Tehuantapeckers and Papagayos (areas of strong winds on the Pacific coast of Central America), trying to come south and see a little of Central America before they 'jump' into the Pacific. There are a bunch of boats in Bahia and Balboa, also getting ready to go. So the net is starting to perk up from 4-5 check-ins to 10 or so. In March, there will be 30 or so boats out moving around every day.
Yesterday I was 'net control' and two new boats checked in from Nicaragua... Fugue and Odyle. They are far away and light (hard to hear) anyway, but when you hear a boat named so screwily, as a net controller, you just have to work through it.
"I heard something like 'Oh-dul', could you please come back and spell that phonetically?" Because they were hard to hear, and kind of new, so they weren't good at phonetics, it took several times before we really got it. (Odyle, as they pronounced it, rhymes with yodel--could someone have really named their boat that?)
On this sleepy little net, many of the net controllers don't listen on the net when it's not their day for net control. So these guys will have to repeat that every time they check in for the next week or so. And on every other net they ever check in on.
Sheesh, can you imagine?
The same day, we had a boat named Fugue. (pronounced Few-zshshz) Another sheesh.
But we are one to talk, I guess. We have had to spell our boat name for net controllers, too. And people tend to remember the Paws part, but not the Soggy parts. We often get called Salty Paws, and even once, Slappy Paws.
(For those of you not familiar with boat radio 'nets'... A net is a gathering of boats in a semi-organized fashion at a particular time of day on a particular frequency. In the harbors where boats tend to congregate, we have VHF nets daily to pass information among boats in the harbor. The VHF is limited range, though--good only for 20 miles or so. So most cruising areas also have HF nets, where boats can talk with each other across longer distances. The Panama Pacific Net covers a pretty wide area--we are currently handling check ins for boats from southern Mexico to Peru, and out to the Galapagos, and into the Pacific for a couple of hundred miles beyond the Galapagos.
A 'net control' is one person designated to run the net for a half hour or so... asking for 'check ins' or 'traffic' and letting the boats come in one by one to call their friends or share weather information or ask questions about the next port they plan to go to.
There is another net that we will pick up once we get a little further west, called the Pacific Seafarer's Net. It covers the whole Pacific Ocean!)
-----
At 1/27/2010 1:45 PM (utc) our position was 00°57.95'S 090°57.73'W
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
