Splashdown

La Playita Anchorage, Panama City, Panama

The work is done, the boat is back in the water, and we are back in the rocky, rolly anchorage at La Playita.



Work in process

Finished product

The simple sounding job of replacing the stuffing box turned into a bit of a marathon affair.  In all, it took three working days (on Sunday the yard was closed), but we accomplished what we set out to do.  The new stuffing box is installed and looks much neater now, the engine has been re-aligned, the engine has had the valves adjusted (routine maintenance item), the bottom has been scraped, sanded and painted with two coats of some vile anti-fouling paint (banned in the US and Canada), some new zincs are installed, and the boat is looking pretty good, at least from the water line down.

Yesterday, Wednesday, the boat was plopped back into the water around 2PM.  We managed to maneuver around to the fuel dock where we took on a full load of diesel, filled our water tanks to the brim and got a few gallons of gasoline (for the outboard and Honda generator).

Spashdown!

When we made our way back around the island to the anchorage, the same RPM on the engine that could not quite push us past 2 knots on the ride to the marina, was now good for 6 knots.  And the engine and drive train sounded much quieter.

Today we made a provisioning trip to the Reba Smith grocery store, making ready for what we hope is a departure date this coming Saturday.  Today is a holiday here (May day) and tomorrow, Friday, will be our only opportunity to check out of the country before the weekend - hopefully everything will go smoothly.  Susanne is cooking up a storm so she can have some ready-made meals in the fridge for the passage to Ecuador.  Other boats that have made the trip this year have taken anything from 5 days to 20 days to make the journey.  It is our hope to be on the shorter end of that scale.

The weather here has settled down to generally very light winds, almost nothing a lot of the time, with temperatures in the mid 30s and high humidity - not all that pleasant for us.  In the afternoons, it usually clouds over some and looks like rain.  We actually got rain one day (the day we were dropping the boat back in the water and taking on fuel) but other than that it has been pretty dry.

The weather forecast for the coming week for our course south looks like very light headwinds for the most part.  Those nice north winds that we had to fight to get in here, and were hoping to use to propel us out, have completely disappeared.  At this point it is looking like it will be a very slow trip if we intend to sail at all.  Fortunately, it also appears that some of the wicked ocean currents that usually impede the progress along the Ecuadorian coast, appear to be slacking off as well.

Oh well, if anything is going to happen, it is going to happen out there, so we will just have to take our best shot.

{GMST}08|54.53|N|79|31.48|W|La Playita, Panama|La Playita, Panama{GEND}