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Timshel - Panama to Galapagos Days 4 and 5



The Pacific seems to be living up to its name, all is calm, no wind, hardly a swell and wall to wall sunshine. But not too good when you want to sail. We did carry the cruising chute for half the night until the wind dropped to 5 to 6 knots true so the engine went on. Now we are trying to sail when we have 5 to 6 knots of wind as mostly its 3 or less. We managed to sail with the chute without pole for most of Wednesday night, got enough apparent wind by coming onto a reach, sometimes a very slow one. Just a few more knots of wind and it would have been great. You see ripples and think here it comes (the wind) but most of them are made by the current (which thankfully is still giving us a knot in the right direction). We've had a couple of goes at sailing today Thursday and are getting very slick at getting the chute up and down. We're not being purists it's just that we don't have quite enough fuel to motor all the way. We've seen dolphins both days though, but not a lot else, a few flying fish, and a couple of cargo ships on the AIS in the distance. Most of the WARC fleet are already in port lucky things and we haven't managed to raise anyone on the SSB today. Reception seemed to much better for the evening schedule most days? most annoying we have lost the smallest batten from our vertical batten rolling main, it must have slipped out when the sail was slatting in the calm, we'll have to to to cobble another one together as it doesn't set properly without it. Have just made banana bread - they were getting rather ripe and it looks OK! NB: took down the Panama flag,always embarrassing to arrive somewhere with the flag of the last port still flying and the officials may take a dim view. It was one of the £2.50 ones (2ft x 3ft) from flagsandbunting.co.uk, its a bit frayed buy it has been up for 3 weeks.

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