Ready To Go

Red Frog Beach

Ariel is ready to go and so are we. Our slip rental ends today so tomorrow morning we will slip our lines and once again be disconnected from shore. Hooray!! When we returned to Ariel, we found her in the worst condition ever, but actually not as bad as we were expecting. We had noticed the condition of the unattended boats before we left last April so we were expecting the worst. The tropics with the high heat and almost constant rain at times is very harsh. Ariel, normally beige in color, was now showing a nice green hue.  After a solid week of cleaning, and the use of a friend's power washer we were able to restore Ariel back to the condition we had left it. The hull was just as bad as the topside, sporting four to eight or more inches of soft growth. I spent a full two hours scrapping the bottom to remove not only the soft growth, but a incredible number of barnacles. I attracted a large gathering of fish. They acted like children, they just had to be right at my scrapper.

In between cleaning chores we made several trips to town to re-provision. We had purposefully exhausted our provisions before leaving. During the next few weeks we will be in an area where it is necessary to bring everything that is going to be needed, so we have provisioned to cover about six weeks. We plan to supplement that with fish, lobster and fruits that we will buy from the locals. We also filled our jerry cans with diesel and gasoline so we should be good to go. We hope to top off the propane tank we have been using at our next port.

Our plan is to get underway Friday, going east.  Remember Panama runs east and west.

During the next two months our internet access will be sporadic but we will do our best to provide updates.