Goodbye Curacao

Well after a month here in Curacao it is finally time to move on. We had to wait three weeks for Colin’s new glasses as they are made up in the USA. We also had to wait as long to get our electronic charts for the Pacific and Australia.

So time to move on... we have spent the last few days loading the boat with about six months worth of supplies. We landed up getting soaked with one load on our tip from the dinghy dock to our boat that resulted in us having to wash about sixty tins plus and dry them well before storing them. Hopefully that is enough as we really don’t want them to rust. A big thank you must go to Clemens who is a fellow BSR practitioner here on Curacao. He spent two days helping us by driving us around picking up supplies and then also taking us to customs and immigration to sign out. As we would have had to lug tons of stuff around on busses we really do appreciate what he did for us. Below: Clemens and Trudy join us at Normans (at the dinghy dock) for "happy hour" after a day bof carting us around shopping. 

Packing all the supplies onto the boat is another exercise altogether. There’s no shoving of things into cupboards as they have to be ordered so that what you hope to use first is at the front or at the top of a locker. Then it all has to be secure so that if we should role onto our side it would all stay in place. Theoretically the boat should be able to roll right around and everything should stay in its place.... we would land up with an almighty mess. No Plans to be sailing in such weather if we can help it.

Tomorrow we leave for the San Blas islands on the SE coast of Panama. The islands are owned and run by the Kuna Indians, who follow a very simple non western way of life. Some islands in the area are slowly changing as there are now some cruise ships that have started to target these islands and so they will slowly be developed as a tourist destination. We were hoping to spend a few weeks here but with all the delays we may only be here for two to three weeks. Our “push” is to get to Colon and through Panama Canal as early as we can in March. But one can sit and wait for a while until the canal authorities approve your transit.

The trip to San Blas should take us around six or so days and turns out to be our second longest passage so far. Our wait here in Curacao has not been that bad an option (weather wise) as the weather on route to San Blas and along the Columbian coast is notorious and the winds the last few weeks have been very strong. The weather window for this week shows lighter winds 15-25 knots for most of the trip with slightly lighter winds towards Panama and 20-30 knots in the rougher middle section on Tuesday when we pass that area. Just add a few more knots here and there for any errors in the grib files and alls good.

We will try updating our blog as we go, via our radio, but that means no photos’ till we hit some place that has internet services... possibly in Colon where we wait for our transit to the Pacific.

Many off the goodbyes at the moment are really ”see you later” as many of the boats that we are meeting up with now, are heading for Panama and the Pacific. For now that’s it and hopefully the next update will be soon if all’s well with the radio connections. All the best

Colin and Sandy