One hundred miles to go

We have sailed 830 of the most incredible passage miles with only 100 more miles left to our destination, Porvenir, Panama. We’ve had sunny day after sunny day, no squalls, no scary stuff at all. For the past four days we’ve barely touched our wing and wing sail configuration and it’s kept us moving in winds ranging from 10 kts to 22 kts.

I finally got it together to make and freeze meals ahead of a passage so we’ve eaten well, and we’ve done 6-hour overnight watches instead of our usual swing 4-hour watch schedule and we both feel pretty rested. It helps that going downwind means we can actually sleep in bed instead of cramped on the bridgedeck settee or in the cockpit. This is definitely what we signed up for.

We are going a little too fast today. The chartplotter calculates our arrival in darkness so we will reef down the mainsail again tonight to slow us down for a dawn landfall. We will be clearing in to Panama but about 60 miles east of the canal. We’ll take a few days to rest, clean up the boat, do some laundry, fill up the water tank.

So it’s one more night of watching Mars over the port sidedeck, the big dipper just astern to starboard, the sails in their now familiar wing and wing configuration, and the green blinking light of the dashboard GPS reassuring us that it knows where we are.