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Juno - Las Perlas



In our case we are meeting on the beach outside the Romantica Hotel, where we land our dinghies and help each other to drag them up above the high-water mark. When we arrive everyone is in the hotel bar; cold beer in one hand and laptop in the other. The hotel has good internet access and as we have been offshore for a week this fix of internet is important to keep in touch with friends and family, and in my case also to upload my blog of the Panama Canal. As darkness falls we sit on the silky soft sand of the beach where a barbecue is served. We win first prize for leg two – from Santa Marta to San Blas. It is a wonderful evening of good company, cold beers and the prospect of the sail to Galapagos, only marred by Fatty feeling unwell and I drop her back to the boat for an early night.

The following morning we are uncertain what to do. Fatty has been awake all night with food poisoning and needs to rest in her bunk, yet we are due to start the 800 mile trip to Galapagos. Fatty urges us to set sail and I reluctantly agree, leaving her in her cabin while we prepare Juno for the five day trip which will take us through the notorious Doldrums where we will cross the Equator on our way to Galapagos. After a brisk start the forecasted winds strengthen all night, peaking at forty knots and creating a confused sea with big waves coming up behind us at short intervals. Hurtling along at 13 knots with heavily reefed sails we also have to run the gantlet of tankers and cargo vessels approaching the Panama Canal from the Pacific. Our AIS tells us that in ten minutes we are due to pass two large freighters at less than two hundred feet; far to close for comfort so we alter course to pass close behind them, huge bursts of spray flying from their bows as they plough into the waves, heavily laden with cargo from the sweatshops of Asia.

After two days rolling around in her bunk in big seas, I am relieved that Fatty is showing signs of recovery, hastened by reassurance from Dr Spike Briggs, one of the doctors who run our 24 hour telemed service who I contact on the satellite phone. It is quite remarkable that Spike is in a ski resort in the French Alps and we are five hundred miles off the coast of Panama, yet he is able to diagnose her symptoms and prescribe medication from our first aid kit which now extends to two boxes of prescription drugs, cannulas, syringes, a defibrillator and assorted splints and bandages.

As we enter the area near the equator called the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) more colloquially known as the Doldrums, the wind dies away, the sea flattens and we start the engine. I come on deck for my night watch at 3am and notice lights behind the transom. I assume that someone has accidentally turned on the running lights but when i check below, all the switches are off. Puzzled, I walk to the stern and realise that the lights are in fact caused by luminesence streaming off the keel and the rudder forming a river of light behind us, fifty metres long, waving thought the dark sea like a magical serpents tail.

As we approach the equator the sun comes up with ten knots of wind from the south-east. We set our big orange spinnaker and slide across the flat ocean at 7 knots with an extra knot gifted to us by the south pacific current that is carrying us obligingly towards our destination. We have had pizza for lunch and now the air is hot and heavy over the boat, an occasional rustle from the spinnaker the only sound above the gentle lapping of the waves on the hull. We expect to cross the equator at midnight tonight, a milestone not to miss.

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