Today is one of those really perfect days. It is bright and sunny, with just a few nice looking clouds drifting discreetly across the sky. There is some,but not alot of activity out here on the estuary - just enough. I don't mind it when a dinghy or panga speeds through the mooring field and makes the boat rock back and forth. After all, it is a boat, right? On the water? It would be like living in a glass house and complaining about the light coming in. were I to complain about a rocking boat. And I also like to see people's regular lives going on along this estuary - the fishing pangas, the wooden canoes,all of it. Yesterday I spent ten bucks for two pounds of jumbo shrimp when a couple in one of those wooden canoes (cayucos) pulled along side offering shrimp for sale.
Mike has gone into San Salvador with our friend and landlord Santos to buy more solar panels and take care of some other hardware-related errands. I am enjoying having the boat to myself - it does not happen often. Actually, I am not alone. The geckos are here. Although we have not seen them since they were released, we have heard them. Geckos, alone among all lizards, call out to each other. It sounds like a bird chirp or a tiny little bark. Unfortunately, my reading and gecko research makes me think it might be a mating call. But this means at the very least some of them are alive, and maybe even thriving. Mike thinks he has noticed a reduction in the roach population since they came aboard. I would like to think so, but am afraid to jinx it by declaring early victory. We both agree it will take several weeks to really notice a difference. I am starting to hate roaches worse than I hate mosquitoes, ticks, or even those hideously annoying circling flys.
Now that it is getting close to being the time we have set to leave El Salvador, I am consciously enjoying all the things about it that I liked in the first place. Mike and I have spent a lot of time recently just sitting in the cockpit, watching the sun set and waving greetings to all the locals who pass by on their daily routines.
This past weekend we noticed that the boats here in our mooring field seemed to have been added as a "sight" on the estuary sight seeing tour boats. On weekends, especially now that it is the dry season, there are lots of local, Salvadoran tourists that come to the hotel we are near as well as other nearby hotels for a weekend at the beach. There are tour boats taking people around the estuary all day, and we noticed that this time, they were carefully picking their way through the field, calling out the names of the boats as they passed each one. I could not understand what else the tour directors were saying, but the passengers were waving and smiling and taking pictures. I liked it - we used to have the same thing happen when we were sailing on San Diego Bay. Tour boats would come by. When the passengers on board were mostly Japanese (a common occurrence) they would yell and wave until they got our attention, then snapped pictures like crazy when we waved back and made "thumbs up" gestures at them. I often wonder how many people in Sapporo or Tokyo have seen pictures of us, grinning like idiots.
Mike has decided that except for a short stop at a bay just over the Costa Rican border, he wants to go straight from here to Panama. That, I think, would be our longest sail to date, but I still have to check the mileage to be sure. I like the idea of a long sail like that,but I have every intention of spending time in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica before I am through with Central America, but I have no problem doing it overland while leaving the boat in Panama. I have started looking at the charts and planning a route for us. (We use GPS underway,but back it up with plots on paper charts as well. We still need to learn celestial navigation - something we plan to do on this trip.) There are charts and cruising guides spread out everywhere in the salon, with lists of this and that being made and revised every day. I enjoy this process, especially when Mike does not get needlessly hyper and bossy.
So that is about it for this entry. Just prep, prep, prep for getting underway, which is a good thing (all the prepping), because I do subscribe to at least one military thing that Mike taught me - The Seven Ps. "Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance." While you cannot be totally prepared for every single thing that might happen or go wrong, you can get ready for the most likely things (like making sure the reefing lines are ready to deploy if the winds get strong) and the really bad things (like having a life boat ready in case the boat sinks). However, the most important thing in an emergency or any scary situation is to remain as calm as possible, which helps to keep clear head. I am almost hoping for bad weather or something to test myself on this trip and see how I measure up. I really want to improve my sailing skills and I want us to use our wind vane self steering apparatus as much as possible. I want to continue to improve my helming skills. I feel like this trip could be a real leap for me as far as being a sailor is concerned. I am not sure why I feel this so strongly right now, but I feel it nonetheless. I want to make 2013 one of those proverbial "banner years" for me and the people I care about. Mazel Tov!
"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking." (Albert Einstein)
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