Friday, May 11, 2007

Santa Catalina Harbor

We are anchored in Providencia's Santa Catalina Harbor, waiting to clear customs. We got here about 2:30 or 3:00 am. The Bush Agency
apparently does all the customs clearing here for boats like ours. They (he?) are supposed to meet us on our boat at 10:00 this
morning.

The trade winds are missing! We have run the motor (one of them) almost all the time since Grand Cayman. Whenever the wind was from
a good direction, there wasn't enough of it. A few times I have put up the sail, but never did last very long. Most of the time the
wind has been 5 to 10 knots, but yesterday it got up to 12 knots occasionally. The boat handled these high winds very well.

I looked at the weather and saw sbutropical depression Andrea with 35-knot winds. I guess Andrea's influence doesn't go this far
southwest.

We've also averaged about a knot of current against us since Panama. I thought this might be a discrepency in our water speed vs.
gps speed, So I took the boat in a circle and checked the speeds. The ocean was indeed against us.

We have over half the fuel we left Grand Cayman with, and we're literally 7/12 of the way to Panama! According to the wind forecast,
unless we wait until next Wednesday we'll be motoring on into Panama.

The fixed to broken ratio is not looking very good at the moment.

1. The air conditioner is about 70% broken. It all works, except the compressor won't come on.

2. The watermaker is fixed, until the errant pump finally fails.

3. The left engine doesn't charge the batteries, for some reason. We asked the boat manufacturer and the engine manufacturer to fix
this a few times when it was under warranty. They never could find any problem. So we're limited to the generator and the right
engine for battery charging.

That looks like the broke-to-fixed is 2.4:1. Fixed-to-broken, on the other hand, is 1:2.4.

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