Leg 6 - Race 10 - Panama to Jamaica

We first had to transfer through the Panama Canal from the Flamenco Marina near Panama City on the Pacific side to Colon on the Caribbean side. We slipped moorings at 7am and only arrived at the marina around 8:30pm that evening. This is a photo of the first lock we went through.



Although we consider our 68ft sailboat quite large our neighbors were MUCH bigger and looked down upon us with much amusement.



A view of the ship behind us.



Due to lack of winds we motored from Colon and met the other boats for a La Mons start where we all line up and at a given signal charge forward and hoist our headsails.



Not very "Caribbean-like" weather. Here we are trying to eke out some extra boat speed by sitting on the rail.



Maybe it helped - Liverpool behind us.



But the again - New York ahead of us. Not much improvement in the weather.



Finally the weather improved and the foul weather gear came off and I took up my normal racing position.



A marginally better result than the prior race with us finishing 7th.

Leg 6 - Race 9

Now that I am in the final phase of this race I thought that a reminder of what I look like might be appropriate. I am not sure if I was worried by the trim of the sails or what I was supposed to cook for dinner that night.



This was the start of the race from Santa Cruz. Just a reminder that we did not participate in Race 8 from Hawaii to Santa Cruz as we were still having our new mast and rigging installed.



Race 9 was mostly a downwind race and with lighter winds we had spinnakers up much of the way.



Here I am sitting behind the grinder waiting for Mandy to issue an instruction to trim the spinnaker. Whilst on watch we would normally rotate the tasks as staring up at the trim of the spinnaker for too long would invariably result in a stiff neck.



Unfortunately with over 1,000 miles still to go the winds died and we had to motor/sail to Panama City in order to get through the Canal within our scheduled tranfer times. We finished the race in 10th position (i.e. last) but in my opinion had some of the best downwind sailing since leaving Liverpool. Western Australia finished 9th and we sailed together often stopping for a mid-ocean swim.



The sunsets and sunrises were spectacular during this race - oh for a glass of red wine to celebrate the sunsets.



We saw many species of birds on this race and some even had the temerity to hitch a ride. This was a Brown Booby that took a fancy to our pulpit.