Puerto Jimenez

8 32.616 N, 83 18.106 W, Puerto Jimenez

Yesterday was even a longer motor than the day before. It started out promising winds of 10 to 15 knots but quickly died as soon as we got to the next way point, a short 4 miles away and headed south. Then the rains started and the thunder with some lightening thrown in to make it exciting. I grabbed some of our lose electronics like iphones, hand held GPS and VHF, ipad, and camera, put them in an anti-static bag and then into the microwave so in case we got struck by lightening a few items might still work. The rain became torrential. We had the radar on, watching the storm cell slowly recede behind us.

Our autopilot is still prone to porpoising. This is when it will not settle on the desired course and overshoots so we move in a sine wave fashion instead of a straight line. It gets annoying after a while and we have been struggling to figure out why it operates this way sometimes and not others in a seemingly random fashion. We have been trying little tricks like adding way points to the course that are less than 7 nautical miles distant thinking that this distance has an effect on the calculations but that is not a hard answer yet. We hope to get in touch with SimRad to see what they say.

We arrived at Puerto Jimenez and set the anchor. The rains come and go so we are not able to open the boat fully to cool off from all of the motoring. The fans are going full blast to compensate.

Today we plan to go to Golfito for a few days. We need to do a few boat chores, provision and get our international exit zarpe before heading to Panama.

Cheers

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