This was originally sent from the boat during our passage from Aruba to Trinidad. However Blogger.com’s “Post by e-mail” never seems to work for me unless I am just posting “This is a Test Post” in which case it works fine. At least I get a chance to (mostly) fix my misspellings and add a few pictures.
Greetings from the Southwestern Caribbean. At least I think so, I have know way of knowing if this remote “en route” blog post will even make it in. It’s about a 50/50 proposition from the times I’ve tested it.
We left yesterday from Aruba after a four day layover waiting for better weather, and are headed for Panama. We anticipate arrival sometime on the 20th of November.
To date the weather has been lovely – the breezes fresh and the skies clear. Yesterday we spent over an hour in the company of two different pods of dolphins. A pod of smaller Spotted Dolphins initially caught up with us. They enjoy sporting and cavorting in the bow wake and the stern wake of the boat, I supposed it is sort of like a water slide or roller coaster for them. A quick gush of current and spray that they cab surf and ride and jump in. The dolphins chase each other around, or travel in formations while leaping, splashing and racing around with seemingly little effort.
After a while the Spotted Dolphins were joined by another pod, this one of Bottlenose Dolphins. The Spotteds are smaller, with a typical size of 6-8’ in length. The Atlantic Bottlenose, which people are most familiar with from aquarium shows and Flipper, is considerably larger with an average size larger than the largest of the Spotteds. With the second pod of dolphins joining the play it became even more hyper, with more leaps and splashes as some of the dolphins were jumping so close it
seemed part of the game was to get the people watching from the boats wet!
We flew the spinnaker for a while today, but that Did Not End Well, as we put an hourglass in it. It then wrapped around the headstay. We learned some valuable lessons about untangling a fouled spinnaker, but when we got it clear we decided we’d had enough for the day and pulled it down and took it below decks. It needs to be untwisted and repacked anyway.
As we were setting the spinnaker another pod of dolphins/porpoises that we couldn’t quite identify came up and swam around us. We believe they were Grampuses, Also called Risso’s Dolphin. They
were much more shy than the other dolphins and cavorted a ways from the boat rather than playing chicken with our bow like the others.
We’re currently about 50 nautical miles off the coast of Columbia, with around 390 miles to sail before we arrive. I do hope this post makes it to the blog for you all!
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At 11/17/2013 20:02 (utc) our position was 12°14.51’N 073°25.11’W
