Month: September 2017

Preparing for Ecuador

We’re back in Panama City, but our time in Panama is coming to a close. Our next port will be Puerto Lucia, Ecuador! The passage will be approximately 725 nautical miles (as the crow files), but all will depend on the wind and our actual course. Our guess right now is that the passage will take us 7-10 days, which will definitely be our longest non-stop passage so far.

The passage from Panama to Ecuador is not exactly an easy one. The prevailing winds pretty much the entire year are from the south-southwest. That is the exact direction we need to go. You can’t sail directly into the wind, and we do not carry enough fuel to motor the entire way to Ecuador! So, we need a plan.

We’ve been studying the pilot charts and reading up on Jimmy Cornell’s advice for taking this route. The pilot charts tell us the historical winds and currents for this time of year. On average, we should bet on SSW winds about 15 kts. At least the predicted calms are virtually zero, and there are no real weather patterns, just random squalls. Of course, as another boat recently said to us, “with climate change, can you really rely on that historical data?” Hmpf!

Here’s an example of a pilot chart from one of Jimmy Cornell’s books…

Right now our plan is going to be to depart Panama City and head over to Taboga Island, which is less than 10 miles away. We want to fill our water tanks before we depart (which is easier to do at anchor than underway). The anchorage here in Panama City is pretty dirty. Yesterday there was a ton of fuel that someone dumped just floating in the anchorage (pretty horrible). That kind of thing with ruin the membrane on our water maker. So, we’re going to head out to the island to fill up on water first.

From Taboga, we are going to head west toward Vista Mar to fill up on fuel. It is really the last place we can fuel up on our way out of Panama. We only carry 70 gallons of diesel (which won’t get us even half way to Ecuador), so we are going to have to use the motor judiciously on our passage. From Vista Mar we will head south to Punta Mala. When we rounded Punta Mala on our way into Panama, we had an adverse current. So, we are hoping this time we’ll get a favorable one.

After rounding Punta Mala, we plan to head west toward Isla Coiba. We want to head as far west as we can to get a better attack angle when we turn southeast toward Ecuador. After we make the turn, it will be all about following the wind. If the wind angle isn’t favorable, we’ll just have to tack back and forth and try and make as much southward progress as possible. It will definitely add some length to our trip.

In addition to planning our route, we have some other tasks to accomplish here. We will have to check out of Panama with the officials and get our zarpe. We also have to send our agent in Ecuador lots of documentation. Ecuador requires you to have an agent to enter the country by boat. And, it is not cheap! We’ve also been told by our agent that since we visited Panama, we have to have a certificate of yellow fever vaccination (which we don’t have). So, while in Panama City, we have got to find a way to get that vaccine.

This morning we already accomplished another important task which was to inspect and adjust our standing rigging. We made some adjustments back in January in La Cruz (Mexico), but we have come a lot of miles since then. We noticed that the forestay looked a little loose, so we dropped the jib and worked on getting it in better condition. We also took a look at our halyard to make sure there wasn’t any chaffing. It’s always good to have more confidence that the rig is going to hold up on a long passage.

Also on my “to do” list is to make sure we’ve got plenty of food aboard. Since we don’t know the exact length of the passage, we’re making a couple of provision runs to make sure we’re stocked up. We also don’t want to just eat cereal and sandwiches for 10 days, so we are making lots of meal preparations. We don’t know if we are going to have calm or rough sea conditions, and we want easy to prepare meals.

If it’s possible, we like to at least have a hot dinner. The best way to do that in most sea conditions is to make one-pot meals that have been cooked ahead of time and stored in the fridge or frozen so that they can be easily heated up underway. I have a pressure cooker with a locking lid and a gimbled stove, so we can make sure that a pot of something does not get dumped all over the interior of the boat while trying to make dinner!

So, I’m working on making batches of chili, pasta, chicken curry and taco meat that are all cooked ahead of time and can be easily frozen and reheated for several meals each. Everything will be in individual zip-lock bags. It is a lot of work (and cooking) to make a week’s worth of dinners!

There are a few other menial tasks we need to do aboard before we depart, but mostly we are just working on getting our heads around being at sea for so long. We’re excited about it. It will be a great challenge for us, and it moves us to another continent! South America, here we come!

I’ll do my best to update the blog, Facebook and Farkwar via the sat phone as soon as we depart and along the way, so those of you who want to can follow our progress all the way to Ecuador.

~katie

 

Whale? Or Shark?

After leaving Isla Pedro Gonzalez, we decided to head south around the tip of Isla Del Rey and make our way back up north. We stopped at Punta Cocos, Isla Canas and Isla Espiritu Santo for a night each. We found a really great snorkeling spot on the seaward side of Isla Espiritu Santo around some small islands. The visibility was marginal, but once you dove down twenty feet or so toward the bottom there was a lot of sea life. We saw huge schools of jacks, sierra mackerel, lots of snappers and all kinds of reef fish.

Here is our view coming into the channel next to Isla Canas…

As we headed around a shallower point at the end of one of the small islands with lots of rocks surrounding it, we saw our first lobster! We had seen the local fishermen with lobsters and knew they were around the Perlas, but after looking under what seems like hundreds of rocks and in cracks and crevasses around the islands, we hadn’t seen one. This little guy was too small, but we kept looking. Eventually we discovered about 5 or 6, but unfortunately none that we could keep.

We’ve tried to keep a very sustainable policy aboard Adagio when it comes to fishing. As much as we like fish and seafood our policy is generally: (1) We don’t take more fish than we can eat; (2) We don’t take large game fish (like marlin) that are not sustainable or fish that we know are overfished; and (3) We try not to take anything that is small or juvenile (the exception here would be if it is damaged from fishing gear and not going to survive.) When it comes to lobsters, we do not take the females (you can see the eggs) or small ones. So, no lobsters for us on this occasion.

We would have stayed longer at Espiritu Santo, but in the last three stops we have gotten eaten alive by mosquitos and no-see-ums. Despite having screens on our hatches and portlights, there are clearly some gaps or holes where these buggers found their way in. We woke up each morning with itchy bites all over. Ugh.

We headed out of Isla Espiritu Santo after breakfast. We still had some fish in the freezer, but Mike really wanted to see if we could catch a yellowfin tuna, so we put the trolling lines out. No yellowfin tuna, but the fishing that morning was crazy. We caught 5 sierra, 2 dorado (mahi mahi) and 2 jack crevalle. It was all catch and release, so those fish lived to see another day.

Just as Mike was about to put the lines back out after letting one of those fish go, he said to me, “I just saw a fin.” My response was, “What kind of fin? Shark?” Just as I was saying those words, I looked off to port and saw a couple of large fins coming out of the water. We both thought it must be a shark, but we pondered aloud what kind of shark was in these waters that was that big. None that we knew of.

As we started to get closer to the fins and were both peering over lifelines, we identified our culprit at the same time as we both shouted “whale shark!” Neither of us had any idea that whale sharks were even in Panama.

Despite their name, whale sharks are not related to whales. They are sharks and are the biggest sharks in the ocean. Our guides tell us that whale sharks can grow up to 60 feet long. That is one hell of a shark! These sharks were about 20-25 feet long, which is still a really big shark. Whale sharks are very docile and not dangerous. We’ve seen them one other time, in the Sea of Cortez last summer when we were able to jump in and swim with them. They are filter feeders with huge, wide mouths that open to filter all of the plankton and other small creatures in the water.
Not only were we shocked to see a whale shark in Panama, we were shocked to see the large number of them. Last year we encountered just 2-3 inside a small bay where we were anchored. This time, we were on a passage between islands and came across a school of at least 50 of them. Our books say that they are usually solitary, but this was a huge school of whale sharks.

They also were either curious about the boat or simply not bothered that we were there, because each one seemed to come right up to the hull or cross right in front of our bow. Some swam right next to us for several minutes. As soon as we came across that first whale shark, we reeled in the fishing lines and put the boat in neutral. There was a favorable current and we simply drifted through the school of whale sharks marveling at them for almost an hour. An incredible experience that made our day.

I really couldn’t get enough of these guys. Here are some photos of the experience. I’ll work on getting video up a little later when I have better wifi access…

Whether it is our sightings of the majestic humpbacks, the docile whale sharks, or all of the colorful reef fish, the experience of being closer to nature gives us the feeling of responsibility toward these creatures. One thing I’ve noticed here in Panama is all of the trash, particularly plastic in the ocean and washed up on the beaches on these beautiful islands. I can’t say that it is all Panama’s fault. If you look at the geography and the prevailing currents into the Gulf of Panama, you can see how this area could end up as a repository for all kinds of things floating in the ocean.

We recently watched a couple of documentaries that another boat gave us about the environment and climate change that were educating but really just reinforced what we already knew – that each of us is responsible for our contributions on this planet. When you see beautiful creatures such as the whale sharks and then see the plastic bottles they have to swim through, you feel sad that humanity is not doing its part. So, my plea to anyone reading this is to take the small, simple steps in your everyday lives to protect our oceans and our planets. And, I encourage everyone to get out there and enjoy nature and its many wonderful creatures. It will change your life!

~katie

 

Fish and Bananas

We ended up staying at Isla Contadora a lot longer than we originally anticipated. We left Panama City with a decent amount of provisions and a couple hundred dollars in cash thinking that we would go out to the Perlas Islands for a week or so and then return to Panama City (only a day sail away) to replenish. But, we liked Isla Contadora so much that we ended up staying for over three weeks!

The little island has some beautiful homes that are weekend/vacation houses for the wealthy in Panama City, but during the week the island is pretty sleepy. Some of the workers take pangas over from Isla Saboga next door to work in the few shops on the island. On the weekends, sportfishers and power yachts come in from the city, and private planes land at the small airstrip on the island to bring in the weekend crowds (which is really not that crowded.)

The anchorage on the north side of Isla Contadora is in a bay surrounded by Islas Saboga, Pacheca, Bartolome and several other small islands making it a pretty protected anchorage. As all of the islands are pretty close together, it gave us lots of places to go exploring in the dinghy. The island was also pretty convenient with a couple of stores that had basic provisions such as rice, butter, eggs and the occasional fruits and veggies brought in about once a week. There was also a gas pump at one of the stores where we could replenish the gas for our dinghy and the generator we use to run the watermaker.

The provisions at the stores were quite a bit more expensive than in Panama City, but that makes sense considering that they have to ferry them in. Gas was $6/gallon, more than twice what we paid in the city. As there are no banks or credit card machines on the island, we burned through our cash pretty quickly.

Even though we ran out of cash, we just weren’t ready to head back to the city yet and still had more islands to explore in the Perlas. We have lots of dried and canned goods on the boat as well as some frozen meat in the freezer. So, we figured we could make do for a while before we have to leave the islands and head back to Panama City to load up the boat for the trip to Ecuador.

One reason we thought we could keep going without heading back to provision was all of the fresh fish that we have been catching. Trolling through the islands we have picked up several really good size sierra (my favorite). And, Mike has gotten really good at spearfishing. He’s been able to pick up lots of really good size snappers, which always make a nice meal.

Mike has been teasing me that I need to try out his speargun and get a fish. But, I just don’t think I have the hunter instinct in me. I LOVE to eat fish, and I don’t mind cooking it at all, but I get a bit squeamish when it comes to killing the fish. Especially the snappers. They have these big eyes that just stare at you when you pull them out of the water. I can’t help but look at them and wonder what they are thinking. Mike usually gives them a “sorry, buddy” and then dispatches them quickly by putting a knife in the top of their head. I usually have to look away. I feel a bit sorry for the fish…until it ends up on my plate.

With no cash left, we weren’t going to be able to buy any fresh fruits and veggies (if we could even find them) to go with our fish. But, another boat told us that they found wild bananas on a little island called Isla Bartolome. Mike really wanted to go find the bananas. So, we took off in the dinghy with a machete and went in search of bananas.

After hacking through quite a bit of vegetation, nearly circling the island, and being careful not to disturb the brown boobies who were sitting on nests on the ground all over the island, Mike finally found some wild banana trees. It’s a good thing he is tall, because he had to jump up with the machete to hack off the bunch of bananas. He was pretty excited about our lovely little bunch.

The bananas were tiny and green. We hung them up in the cockpit wondering and hoping that they would ripen. After a few days the bananas slowly started to turn yellow and we tentatively took a bite. These tiny bananas were so sweet and just perfect! As the bunch started to ripen more, we ended up eating bananas all day long. They were so good that we actually went back and got another bunch.

We’re still in the islands now. We moved down farther south to Isla Pedro Gonzales. We were going to go down to the next island called Isla San Jose. But, we heard from another boat anchored here that the military was doing something down on that island for the next month and they were actually escorted away from the island. So, we think our plan is going to head down around the tip of Isla Del Rey, the biggest island in the Perlas, sometime in the next couple of days. We may not have any cash to continue our island adventure, but we know that we will at least have fish and bananas to eat!

~katie