Thursday 15th August 2013
Day 9
12am still my watch.
Well The Captain has just woke up and we are both sitting here watching the nav thingy, as we are about to cross the equator this is a huge excitement for us.
I had my ipad ready, to take a photo, we also had a close watch on a big ship coming our way, and still more fishing boats.
I go to take a pic it's 12.15am, even though the clock on the nav thingy says later, we still have not worked out how to change that yet.
I missed it by one second, man I could not believe it, but we are now over the other side..hahaha another tick off our list.
And no we did not celebrate as we were both way too tired, but the boat did, by breaking the stay sail. There is a bracket under the boom that holds it in place and it broke away.
So The Captain with the harness on goes out and brings it in and ties it down.
Now we are down to two sails.
7am
It's day light now and we can see land, I had a huge sleep, over 5 hours, as The Captain has been too busy to wake me, he just let me sleep, which was so nice.
And once again the main sail has chaffed through, we are down to one sail only.
The Captain is so so not happy, we paid a fortune for this new sail system, and it has let us down time and time again.
We picked up our pilot, and on the boat he hops, and can not speak a word of English, great still so wish we had done those Spanish lessons.
But with a lot of hand directions and sign language we made it here.
At one stage we were heading straight for a beach, in less than a meter of water, I'm freaking out, telling The Captain I really don't like this, and where the hell is he taking us, as there was no entrance, nothing.
I'm thinking maybe they want to wreak our boat and claim salvage rights.
Yeah I know but it has happened before.
Anyway he finally tells us to go at a different angle, apparently we were just going around a sandbank, and he gets us to the anchorage.
Now they want us to use their mooring balls, and he has jumped back in his boat now and told us to follow him, well we think that's what he said.
We get way too close to other boats and we were so uncomfortable, with this but they managed to tie us up, to a buoy, front and back, and here we are.
Next he wants to take all our papers and passports, to shore, I tell the Captain I'm not happy about this and he agrees, so he try's to go with him, and he is saying no no.
We ended up ringing on the radio to the port authority, who speaks some English, and they say this is normal, so we let him take it all.
And we are to stay on the boat, as we have not had a yellow fever shot, and we had no idea we needed one, see we can communicate, with these guys.
Within ten minutes, another boat comes out with two officials and climb on board.
He had papers with him as well.
He asked us all about the boat what food we had on board, what medication we had, do we have any drugs, etc
And also had we had shots for yellow fever.
This was all done with him speaking no English at all, but the young guy with him could speak a tiny bit.
To the fact that he was trying to ask us if we had any meat on board, we had no idea what he was saying, and the young guy was struggling as well, to find the right word, in the end he just said moo moo, we all burst out laughing, but at least we knew what he was asking.
Then he went down and checked all the fridges, and seemed happy, signed the papers and we were allowed ashore, but had to go straight to the port authority.
So get to shore, go see these guys, and they want our Zarpe, now I hear you saying what is a Zarpe, well when you check out of one country to the next, they give you a piece of paper to take to the next country, and this is called a Zarpe.
Well they wanted ours and us being the pirates that we are did not check out in Panama.
Why? Well it was going to cost us a fortune, as we where kinda flying under the radar, and had not paid a lot of there fees, so we just left.
So get here and they will not accept that, so now we are only allowed to stay for 72 hours and then we have to leave, if there was nothing wrong with the boat we would not of been allowed to stay at all.
But they can see we need to fix the three sails and that we need fuel.
So as I cook up are fish, which was really nice, we enjoyed a drink on deck, and looking at all the lights around here, it maybe a third world country, but it's clean and has a really nice feel about it, and everyone is really friendly.
Well tomorrow is anther day.