Day 182, Year 1: If . . . Then
Date: Monday, April 17, 2006
Weather: Cloudy Mornings and Evenings; Beautiful, Sunny Days
Location: Academy Bay, Puerto Ayoro, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos
It is evening and the sun is sinking down behind the island highlands. At anchor here, we face due east and the sun sets behind us. The last few days we have had cloudy skies at sunrise and sunset, but by mid-morning the clouds dissipate and we have those beautiful blue skies until around 1600.
Today I continued to work on the Galapagos tour logs and pictures and I applied teak oil to the deck and cockpit floor. We are getting ready to go out to dinner with Tom and Betty Lee of Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap is a catamaran out of Mobile, Alabama, and Katherine from New Zealand is crew for them. Tom also has a college classmate, Bob, who has joined them for the trip to the Marquesas. They are headed to Isabella tomorrow and will be leaving for the Marquesas early next week. We hope to be transiting at the same time and want to keep in touch as we make the crossing. We will discuss those plans over dinner tonight.
The big news of the day is that our needed parts have finally departed Panama City. They arrived there last Wednesday at 6:30 PM local time and did not move until today. Evidently in Panama, everything closes on Holy Thursday and Good Friday AND the entire Easter weekend. So despite the efforts of Mack Boring and the fact that we paid Fed Ex $300 for priority shipping, we will not receive the parts until later this week.
IF the parts arrive on Wednesday evening as our agent, Johnny Romero, thinks they will . . . THEN we will install them on Thursday.
And IF the parts do the trick . . . THEN we will be ready to leave here on Friday.
But since I refuse to start a transit on a Friday, supposedly bad luck of which we do not need any more, THEN we will go to Floreana on Friday and begin our transit on Saturday.
We will keep you posted on progress.