236: TWO DAY UNCOMFORTABLE PASSAGE TO THE SAN BLAS ISLANDS

I'm fruity all right. In this video our friend Jim arrives to help us with our 40 hour passage but we end up doing endless boat projects before Jim runs out of time and has to go home. Eventually we get favorable conditions and head out to sea arriving safely in the sandblast islands. This morning we are taking off and headed to Saigon. In Saigon we're going to work with a rigger to get some set screws out of our jib. The simplest solution is if these don't come out or if they're stuck or if this starts sliding you just drill a drill a hole through the whole thing and then tap it out and put a bolt you know as long as you don't touch the wire inside you're good. Six months ago back in the Rio Dulce rigger Tom looked at our jib furler and suggested that we get the screws out and teff gel them. If we could not remove them then we would have to drill them out so we asked rigger Rick to help us with this project. It's a beautiful day out here not a lot of wind but we might be able to sail the jib this morning. We are coming in now to Saigon Bay which is right at the base of the airport. It's starting to rain a little bit but hopefully it'll clear up once we start doing some boat work. Blue skies behind us hopefully they're gonna follow. So it looks like it's already been oversized once. Really? No way. What did I tell about that vinegar? Oh yeah you can tell that it does a good job. For the past three days Brown has been injecting vinegar into the screws in the jib to see if it's possible to loosen all of the corrosion and get the screws out. What we know now is that part of annual maintenance should be removing the screws on the furling drum and on the furler and treating them with teff gel. Number two goes. Number three isn't going. Hang on. Drum roll. We're not there yet. Ladies and gentlemen ask for it by name the corrosion eliminator. Yeah this stuff is the bomb. This is the corrosion king. Rick working on the boat teaching us some new tricks. Sometimes on older boats those screws will come loose and the foil will separate a little bit. If it gets real loose you'll have trouble putting the sail up and down. So a normal set screw would just have the threads and then the end of it would push against the aluminum. This has this pin that goes into the hole. Those are expensive. Yeah $15 a piece. Totally. Now the bad part about this is that if your foil is moving around now it means that that pin dug the hole in the aluminum out a little bit. So it will never be able to be tightened. The solution would be to move the foil slightly. Okay. Drill new holes. That's probably what I would do on my boat. But you want to double check with Pro-Furl to make sure that there's that moving it because I think you can you can move it like this much. What's the downside to having it the way we have it now? It's going to continue to loosen up. You can mitigate that a bit by furling downwind. Right. You're not furling upwind. Okay. So you're not luffing and beating and you should do that anyway on a multi-hull for sure. A multi-hull like this is light enough where it can accelerate when you go downwind. So it can relieve some pressure off of the boat. And you'll get a much more even wrap and a much more controlled wrap and you won't beat the leech of the sail up which is what kills sails. After a very rainy morning we've got a beautiful afternoon with blue skies and no rain and we are going to pick up anchor here in a minute and head off to Bocastown because tomorrow our friend Jim is coming in and Jim is going to help us make a crossing. And we got the green light to leave here on Monday so we've got a few days with Jim here in Bocastown and then we're off. So we also get to see our friends Heidi and Jurgen on Valentin today. We haven't seen them in a month so it'll be fun to see them. All right you ready babe? Ready. We got a spot? Great spot. Perfect. It is a rainy day when Jim is arriving but he's gonna bring sunshine and Christmas to us since he's got all of our Amazon packages in his bag. Hi Jim. Jim is here and it's Christmas time. Setting the bar very high for next visitors. Yeah that's right. Alex you're still only the best by a small margin but it's all the country. He's a good friend isn't he? After almost a year with the same chain markers we needed to re-mark the chain and I created this key so that anyone who picks up our chain knows exactly how much chain is out. All right we're prepping the screws that are going to attach the fishing pole holder with our new contraption up on the handle on our port side and then we're going to run the cables. So thank you Jim for all your help. Absolutely. Oh yeah making progress. Final stage getting this puppy on the railing. That's awesome. Oh we're having a great time. It's awesome. We've run all the cables. Piece of cake. Now we need to just figure out if it works. Nothing is ever easy. Every job takes 10 times longer than you think. That's boat life. All right after a few hours of work we have found the final place for our Starlink and we'll have to fix that. The cable is there and through and goes through the roof into the salon. We are moving back from Red Frog off to Bocas town because Jim has a flight here today. Jim came down to Bocas del Toro to help us with the crossing to the San Blas Islands but unfortunately we just never got a weather window that we felt completely comfortable with. Had a wonderful week on the blown away. Came down to just see what the cruiser life was all about. I've spent my whole life on boats traveling around the world but not really this exact lifestyle so it was very interesting. It was wonderful. Exceeded my expectations. We had planned to do a passage down to the southern part of Panama and I was really looking forward to that to add to my training as a captain but we'll catch that some other time in the future. It's been a wonderful experience even though we've traveled a limited distance. Bocas has been wonderful. What a great little town. Thank you guys very much. We are prepping for our trip to the San Blas Islands. As you can hear, Brown is cooking. I'm doing some navigation work. Putting in the points into our chart plotter. This book is the bible of the San Blas or Panama in general that because you can't trust the maps unfortunately on Navionics because they're poorly charted so everyone has this book and also OpenCPN. We're using the charts there because the San Blas Islands are full of reef and they will rip your boat to shreds so we're trying to plan so that when we leave here we are set. Tomorrow, second time is the charm. We are leaving for the San Blas Islands but that's what we thought two weeks ago today when we were going to leave and we didn't but this one actually looks like a window that we're going to take so we have been working really hard to get the boat in order. We have got our go bags ready. We've got food prep going on. We're going into the San Blas Islands which has no grocery stores so we're getting the fruit ready. Getting it frozen. I'm fruity all right. We have changed our bridle because our bridle here was spliced and it has completely deteriorated and with 20 knot winds in the San Blas Islands we didn't want to take a chance with our bridle. We have also set our jack lines so that if we have to go to the front of the boat or over the top of the boat we are ready for that. I think we're ready to go. We need to get some fuel tomorrow and also a few more groceries. We like this fruit stand. He has cold coconuts and they've got good prices. Really would friendly service really encourage you to come here. He also will negotiate prices. This is the fuel station if you're in Bocas del Toro and need gasoline for your dinghy. We're right across from the island of Bocas and you can get it with oil or without oil. They will do that for you. There's a group of us I think that are leaving in the early afternoon. That way we've got daylight when we arrive in the San Blas which is really important because of the reefs and the uncharted waters. It's been five weeks here in Bocas del Toro. We've loved it here but it is time to go. Everything needs to be closed and locked, secured. We're sleeping upstairs so our cabin is empty. Everything is secured. We've got our bed made ready to go for tonight. Everything on the sides is put away. We have our life jackets and our go bags and water out there ready to go if we need it. Hopefully never need it. Dinghy is secured and we're ready to pull up anchor here in about 20 minutes. Definitely some pre-passage jitters. I think we're all a little bit concerned because the waves have been pretty big and everyone coming in here has said that it's been really unpleasant. So we're not sure what to expect. We're hoping for the best but just not sure what's going to actually be out there when we get out there. We're going with two other boats, Vela and Valentin. Vela has already left. They're a bit slower than we are and Valentin is picking up anchor with us at five. The forecast is the best it's been in a month and we've been told by the weather router you're not going to get much better than this. Very excited. Our anchor has come up without a problem. Goodbye Bucas. Good job babe. Here we go. Finally. So far the assessment is not too bad though we're still a bit in the straights so I'm sure it's going to get a lot more rolly once we get out there. It's the last of the land here. We're almost out into the full ocean. We've got some big waves but they're about seven or nine seconds in between them so not too bad. We're just riding them which is okay. It's pretty smooth so far. First night watch. Groundest went to sleep and we're doing great. We have very little wind, only six knots which is amazing. Absolutely amazing going north. We never thought we'd be able to do this. We're going way north to be able to get into position so then be able to just sail directly to the sandblast. Everything is going really well. Better than we ever expected. We thought we'd be getting beaten up and we are just flying. It's been fantastic. Hey guys. Good morning. It is about 7 30 in the morning and we have had somewhat unbearable night. The sea stage has been much better than expected. Went around 10 miles per hour going straight in with about eight foot swell but it's spread apart pretty well. It's not that choppy. Highly doable. We've been running just one engine because morning at about 6 30 we raised our main and put out our jib and that stabilized the boat considerably and we are still motor sailing because we're so close to the wind that we need the motor on to keep us pointed in the right direction otherwise we're fall off. We are scheduled to get in right at sunrise tomorrow morning. The wind should pick up later on today which is going to speed us up a little bit. We may double reef to main. We're just going to make adjustments as we go and see what works. Yeah at first we were really dreading this because it seemed like it was going to be a lot rougher with all the information that we had. Still could get rough but it's you know not the most comfortable one but it's not crazy discomforting. We're keeping a good pace. So far so good. I am back from the dead. Thankfully feel much better and doing something that I have been remiss in not doing before this and that is marking our lines for where we have a first and second reef. I can only do the first reef because that's what we've got in now. When we put in a second reef I'll do it then but we need to mark the lines so that from the cockpit I can tell where to stop the lines for our first reef. All right we are in front of the traffic zone for the Panama Canal and there's an awful lot of boat traffic going in and out. Thankfully not where we are for the most part. We've got a lot wave action out here and it's a little bit hard to focus on that and also on the sails. Other than that it's an uneventful night. All right it's 2 20 my second night shift and I've got a big passenger ship playing chicken with me. I just spoke to the French captain. We are going to pass port to port. He was very nice. He has the ability to adjust. I do not. So he is going to move out a little bit I think is what he said and hopefully he'll start to do that. Looks like he is. We don't have any room to the right. There's a big fish park there and he has a lot of room to his starboard side so I'm glad he was willing to make that adjustment. So to give me some more maneuverability and control I've turned on my starboard engine. He's still really within a mile so it's a bit close. It's a 700 foot ship and I don't really want to mess around with this so I've got my engine on and that helps with steering out here as well. Looking forward to this being over. All right he's off to port side now. That was a little bit too much excitement for this hour of the morning. Only two hours left to go. Very excited to get into flat calm water and get the sails down and just get some sleep. We're almost there. It's a brisk day today. A lot of wind today and we're looking forward to getting into the anchorage now. We're getting really excited. We're almost behind the reef which means that things will get a little bit smoother around just starting the engines. We can see the island. We can see our friends and the north and south anchorage and we're going to go to the south this morning. Oh it's so crazy that we're here but we're not here yet. Once we drop anchor then we could celebrate. Oh we made it babe. Oh my goodness. Oh that was a long two days. You start when you're tired and then you get tireder. We are the land of palm trees and white beaches. It's a big train wreck here after a long passage. We need to clean this all up, tidy everything up but first we need to get something to eat and just chill for a minute so that's the plan.