WEATHER AND TRAVEL
Isla Espiritu Santo, Islas Las Perlas, Panamá, Thursday, 03 December 2009

Time flies when you're having fun! It also goes pretty quickly when you
are doing nearly nothing.

We have now been here anchor now for just over a week. Every six hours the
tide changes and the boat swings around by 180 degrees. We are just now at
the full moon and the tides are at their most extreme for the month. At
this time of the year, the full-moon tides are getting a little higher
each month, sending the logs and debris that have been washed off the
beaches through our anchorage. Occasionally we see whole, leafless trees
pass through and we know there will be lots more out in the Gulf of
Panamá. There they are recognizable (at least in the day or moonlight) by
the large numbers of seabirds that use them as resting perches. At night
the logs can be a nuisance.

With the arrival of the dry season, the temperatures climb rapidly during
the sunny mornings to exceed 30o C. Unless I wet it down with seawater,
the painted deck becomes a little hot to my bare feet and the bronze bits
are intolerable. I try to get any little jobs done before 0900 and take it
easy after that. By noon, the air becomes listless and despite the sun
awning we stay below where the cabin fans keep things comfortable for a
few hours longer. By late afternoon, it is better in the cockpit provided
one rigs some side curtains against the declining sun.

The electrical plug for our Iridium satphone acts up, and suddenly we are
not able to recharge it. We make a little trip to S/V Lumme to get help
from Wolfgang and have a visit with him and Ute. It is early afternoon.
There is no breeze and we are all bathed in perspiration. Clearly it would
be better to be taking a siesta, but Wolfgang graciously spends a few
hours taking apart our plug and getting things working again. Apparently,
we simply let the battery level get too low and it could not get itself
going again.

While we there we had a general discussion about the pros and contras of
Iridium satphones versus a shortwave alternative like Sailmail or Winlink.
We bought our satphone seven or eight years ago when there were perhaps
more limitations to SSB (Single Sideband) or HAM-based systems than there
are now. Back then, being able reliably to get online via shortwave was a
severe limitation though Wolfgang says that, with the increased use of
computers onboard and more access frequencies, this is no longer a real
issue. And Sailmail only costs $250 per annum.

The satphone, of course, is much more expensive, but it is still able to
deal with a lot higher volumes of data than the shortwave alternatives
and, with Iridium, access to a signal is always available anywhere in the
world. Not to mention that, if we wanted to move to shortwave we would
have to come up with at least $1,000 or $1,500 in equipment and
installation costs to get started.

We have a SSB receiver that we bought used from another cruiser. It is a
very nice piece of equipment, but we have not yet got into the habit of
listening into the regular daily cruiser chat rooms. We tried it the other
night and got nothing, but according to Batwing, "propagation" was
terrible. What do we know? I personally can hardly stand even five minutes
of static and fiddling with the dials, so if Kathleen is not interested in
the shortwave community aspects of all this, we might not become devotees.

We have postponed our departure from Espiritu Santo after Wolfgang
downloaded GRIB weather files. These are excellent weather sources
prepared by the NOAA in the U.S.A. The 5-day forecast shows mainly W and
NW light winds for the next three days or so, which is not particularly
good for a crossing of the Gulf of Panamá to Punta Mala. Without the
forecast, we would probably just have made the transit anyway. It would
not have been risky, but it would have been bumpy and largely to windward
and we would have had to motor all or most of the 100 Nm around the point.
We have approximately three weeks before we have to be in Costa Rica. So,
we shall stay here for a few more days.

It's not like it is a hardship posting, after all!