December 2nd, 2016

...now browsing by day

 

Friday December 2nd. Still stuck in Banderas Bay.

Friday, December 2nd, 2016

The windows of the (over) air-conditioned lounge in the marina are all steamed up. It started raining and lightning and thunder over the foot hills. The digital chart project has gotten out of hand, with me. I probably should have never chosen the ChartWorld source. The encrypted S-63  vector charts turn out to contain too little detail for entering harbors/anchorages. And it took for ever to obtain the permits from two different parts of the world. The attractive aspect is the fact that I can buy them at a reasonable price for a limited duration. I only need the charts for Mexico and Central America for the next three months. A 19 year old on one of the Vancouver boats here finally was able to make some sense out of the process. And now he will attempt to help me on Saturday morning with getting more details for the shore portions of my scheduled sail to the Panama Canal by using pictures from Google Earth overlaid on the charts. This means that I now am looking at Sunday departure, once the weather has cleared up.

Last Wednesday night was the first of the winter season Wednesday night beer can races. I needed to get some fresh air and I really enjoyed sailing in a small fleet of participants. The weather mark was nowhere to be found. I think that on the way back I did see just the tip of the pole above the surface. Most likely it had been set with too little scope at low tide. I was the second boat to get to the area of the weather mark and when the rest of the fleet heard of the missing mark and saw that we had become stuck in a windless hole they turned around. I was the only boat in my small start that sailed out of the hole and finished the course. Not many cruising boats can get into a semi racing mode like I can, with everything I own aboard and single hand. Here is a link to a short pro-go video I shot. You will see that at the end I encounter the “Cat” boat. “Kat”arina was taking a go-pro video of me while I took mine of their boat. You may eventually see her mirror video on this blog.

This Booby on a stick was balancing on the vane of the windspeed indicator of my neighbor’s boat. This appears to be a red footed booby but the beak on the ones I see here is mostly a light blue. 003