We are currently stuck in Curacao waiting on a suitable weather window to sail to Shelter Bay. Friday looks promising. Chris Parker is coming back to us today with his advice.

We are putting our time here to good use installing a set of Glendinning Electronic throttles to replace the awful Volvo Penta ones. Dee is also working on sunshades for the cockpit.

We also ordered a Rainman High Output Portable Watermaker (100+ litres per hour) from our friend Kevin. We will leave this in its cases under our bed, pickled, in case our primary ESSBASE Watermaker fails. In the event we need to use it, we wiill pull it out, plug it into our 230V outlet, drop an inlet hose into the sea and the outlet hose into our water tanks and make water. Simple solution with no additional plumping. Barbara and Joe are flying it down to Panama when they come down to sail with us to the Galapagos.

We have made great progess on organising our Galapagos stay. We have engaged Javier Plúa Rizzo from YACHT AGENTS GALAPAGOS to organise our stay and paid him 50% of the fees to get the process underway. This needs to be done 2 months out from our expected arrival.

We have joined the Pacific Posse (www.pacificposse.com) for $175USD and thats already paid for itself with discounts for the Galapagos and Panama Canal agents plus Shelter Bay Marina. Nice to be part of a group (its a posse not a rally so we don’t travel together). We have also engaged Erick Galvez from Centenario & Co. as our Panama Canal agent. He will also organise our fumigation certificate for the Galapagos. We are looking to transit the canal at the end of February after visting Boca Del Toros.

Finally we are in the process of getting our French Long Stay visas for French Polynesia. We are still trying to organise an interview for the embassy in Panama. Fingers crossed.