As darkness falls on the third night, I can see threateningly dark squall
-clouds towering into the sky ahead of us, with continuous lightening
flashes silhouetting the big clouds. Every afternoon the clouds build up
around us, drifting down from the W on the wind, picking up water into the
heights where it cools again and falls like an apron around the cloud. We
might just be lucky and miss out on the localised blows and rain that go
with this one.

I am on watch in the dark while Kathleen sleeps below. I have not dropped
the jibsail at dusk or reefed in the mainsail. But as the evening
progresses I became more and more anxious. I admit that my anxiety level
always goes up in the dark; a fluffy cloud looks menacing when all you see
is a huge black blob; a slatting boom is annoying in the daytime but
drives you mad at night. I didn't want to rob Kathleen unnecessarily of
her off-watch sleep. But, I also didn't want to be caught off guard by a
squall and have to do the sail-handling in rain and wind as well as in the
dark. I also didn't want to let my anxiety get the better of me, nor to
lose the nice speed of movement we were at present enjoying.

Finally, when I see the lightening getting closer, I go below and wake
Kathleen. Startled, she jumps up immediately and comes out into the
cockpit. I explain that I am about to drop the jibsail. This hanked-on
sail requires going forward to the mast and then climbing out on the
bowsprit to pull the sail down. A furling sail would be better, no doubt.
But we have hanked-on sails so there is nothing for it but to get
cracking.

The rain and gusts begin just as we start the process. Kathleen swings the
big tiller over to bring Vilisar up into the wind, the jibsail halyard is
let go, and the sail drops as usual only about half way. I have to lean
out over the bowsprit to pull it down and lash it with sail ties that I
have draped around my neck before the manoeuvre. Meanwhile, our bow is
pitching up and down in the waves, and the wind is causing a big flap. To
make things easier for myself, I had already dropped the smaller staysail
onto the dinghy lying upside down on the foredeck; it is attached to its
own wooden boomlet, which with the sail amidships tends to flog badly. It
is sometimes referred to as a 'widowmaker'; if you get bonged by it you
will at least have a few bruises to show for it and you could easily
injure yourself more seriously. That's why I always drop it before working
on the jib. I plan to raise it again once I have completed other sail
jobs, like reefing the main.

Unfortunately, the lines attaching the clew to the staysail boom decided
at this point to come loose, the boomlet drops with a clunk onto the
dinghy and then slides onto the deck and the staysail begins flapping
noisily in the wind. My rope attachments have come undone, but there is
still a stainless steel carabiner attached to the clew; it will definitely
smart if it hits me in its wild flogging! In a torrent of swearing I
smother the sail at last and lash it down. I abandon any thought of
repairing the clew attachment in the dark and rainy night.

The next job is to support the mainsail boom with the topping lift, drop
the mainsail halfway until I can get a metal hook into the grommet, pull
in and secure the reefing pennants and hoist the now reefed mainsail
again. This all takes several minutes of strenuous labour while Kathleen
steers, but when I am done the mainsail is exposing only about a third of
the wind surface that a fully hoisted mainsail offers. The boat, which had
been heeling strongly, now stands up straight while the wind sings in the
rigging. I return crouched along the side deck to the cockpit and flop
down, sweating and exhausted. Man! I'm getting too old for this! Kathleen
had been at the tiller the whole time and is also thoroughly relieved that
the job is done.

We were not sailing under a double-reefed main. I should have liked to
have had the staysail as well, but that is now out of the question until
daylight. We experiment with the windvane steering, which however seems
quite amenable to having only the reefed mainsail to work with. Our speed
is of course slower, but we feel less stressed, less anxious.

With all that work completed, the squall expends itself, and except for a
few more drops of rain passes off to the E. As the night wears on, the W
wind drops so there is hardly enough wind to keep the mainsail filled or
the bow pointed up well into the wind and waves. The boom therefore begins
slatting hard every few minutes, causing the mainsail also to snap loudly.
If it is loud on deck it is doubly so below, the boom shaking the whole
boat, it seems. It disturbs sleep and makes us nervous.

The big dark clouds swallow the night sky and the stars along with it. But
no more squalls. We might well shake out the reef and hoist the jib and
spare ourselves a bad night. But we had decided to be cautious and wait
until morning.

The days have in fact been lovely. The temperatures are warm but nothing
like as oppressive as the Costa Rican or Panamanian coasts. You can sit
out in cockpit at night until it gets to damp from the dew. The winds have
remained mainly westerly, but have taken on a more and more southerly
component. The windvane steering deals with it well, and we are not
required to sit in our uncomfortable cockpit in the midday sun or the
night-time damps. We can go below and only check around the horizon every
15 or 20 minutes, i.e., the time it takes for a steamer to come over the
horizon and mow you flat. We 'sit' our watches, on other words. We read.
We doze if we are off watch to make up for the interrupted sleep from the
night before. During the day we are often both awake and we spend time
talking or making a light meal.

Our tropical fruit is delicious: mangos, pineapples, oranges. They taste
almost like candy, they are so sweet. But they are all ripening at the
same time. How many ways can you prepare mango? And, for the moment,
neither one of us wants to cook. We are happy with fruits and various
salads of fruits, potatoes and vegetables. We shall miss the fresh stuff
in a couple of weeks, though we still have lots of onions, potatoes,
cabbages and a local potato-substitute whose name I cannot now recall. It
looks like a giant pear and is crispy when you cut into it. We didn't buy
manioc or yucca, as I don't really know how to prepare it.

Now in Day 5 (at dusk today; we are using GMT or UTC time which is 5 hours
ahead of Panamá time), we seem to be settling in. The good news is that we
might actually have traversed the ITCZ without much fuss. Last night was
squall-free. This morning (Tuesday, 23MAR10) the winds had shifted from W
to SW, which of course is what we expected after we came out the S side of
the Doldrums. We are actually sailing SSE and sometimes as far left as
ESE. We obviously cannot sail straight to SW, though that is our rhumb
line. But eventually, at the latest at the equator, we should surely
encounter SE Trades. Then we can turn and make for French Polynesia some
3,500 Nm away to the WSW. We know how slow it can be between Costa Rica
and the equator. So, if the traversing of the ITCZ has already taken
place, as is devoutly to be wished, we should count ourselves fortunate.

Position at 1500 UTC (11:00 Eastern Daylight Savings Time): N 4 degrees
53.45, W 84 degrees 55.31