It's not all beer and skittles in the South Pacific

Here's a quick update from my desk in Cleveland:

Quester left Panama City early on Sunday morning, headed SSW and then SW toward the mouth of Panama Bay and the open ocean beyond. Currently in about 6N, 80W headed SSW at 0-4kt.

They've run in to some unhelpful winds...


The weather in that area is notoriously unreliable-- the spiteful and capricious doldrums about which Coleridge wrote:

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Two recent text emails pleading for weather information described "dead calm but having fun otherwise" and "a hateful passage, never to be repeated."

Hopefully the low causing the calm winds will move east in the next few days and allow the proper southeast trades to return.