Feb 25th-- Light

1500 I'm again on watch. It is warm (not as hot) and sweltery. Again the wind blew overnight and this time we got up to 9kt with a steady 7 for much of the night. We covered 134 miles our first day at sea which is respectable considering the calms. Again, we put up the spinnaker at dawn and flew it until noon when the wind dropped below 4kt. So we're motoring again this afternoon and the water is glassy smooth except for the remnant swells.

Today's Improvements:
--Fixed the spark ignighters on two of the stove burners.
--Placed a big white awning (you can see it in our pics from Shelter Bay) over the dodger and bimini to shade the dark blue Sunbrella material from the sun - a MAJOR IMPROVEMENT because it minimizes the amount of radiant heat in the cockpit. I'm typing this there and it's very pleasant!

Today's Conversations:

--0900: The Oyster Rally Single Side Band (SSB) morning radio check-in and chat started up again today. Every boat gets called by the chat moderator and tells where they are and what they're doing. Very fun to hear from the other boats. We don't get the Yellowbrick fleet track data on the boat so this is how we know who's where. Right now we're the earliest boat to leave the Gulf of Panama and head to Galapagos, so we're in 1st place!!!
--1200 Mike gave me a navigation lesson using his beautiful German sextant. My sightings were off 6 miles in latitude and 22 miles in longitude (compared to the GPS) which he said was quite good.
--Jan's really enjoying her Kindle and Deb hers.
--Joe's a big fisherman and has his lures in the water during daylight hours but no luck yet. But he has a very nice rod and reel. The fish should be impressed!

The Galapagos:
--We can begin to visualize arriving in the Islands in about a week and we're comparing notes on what to do. Joe is on his sat phone with his girlfriend, Jenny, and hotels in San Jose and it looks like she'll fly in to visit while we're there. We speculate he'll spend more on sat phone minutes than on the hotel!

Today's Excitement:
--We've seen many dolphins since leaving Panama City, and also some breeching from afar which we assume were a pod of small whales, and also a great commotion and splashing which may have been tuna or shark attacking a school of fish. Jan saw a ray leaping out of the water!

Pray (or chant, or wish) for wind. I keep forgetting to mention it has been pretty constantly clear in Panama with only one brief rain shower so far. It's the dry season. It's warm even at night so shorts or swimsuit and t-shirt is all we need for overnight watches.