Lauren and I did some more boat work this morning before heading in for sight-seeing.  We worked on re-marking the anchor chain every 25´ (all but the last part that´s in the water now), repairing our main cabin door latch/lock, and checking out the bottom.  The visibility isn´t too great here in Academy Bay, but we were able to clean off some nasty brown algae that has grown above the waterline in the areas that are temprorarily submerged when we´re sailing.  It grew on the way from Panama and we´d never seen it before.  We also cleared the last of the fishing line off of the port prop, where we noticed that the line spinning on the prop abraded a couple spots down to the glass on the rudder — that will be a project for another day.  We checked the zincs on the shafts and they look fine, so we´re good to go in terms of bottom work until the next anchorage.

The internet is really, really slow all over town today, so we´ll catch you up on today´s exciting adventures tomorrow.  In the meantime, here are some answers to questions from the mailbag.  We got a cool e-mail from Dave in Chicago and here are answers to his questions.  Feel free to send us some questions if you have them and we´ll get to them when we get a chance.  If you want to comment on a blog, you can click on the conversation bubble that´s to the left of the blog title.

Q: Have you been able to do any scuba diving?  Also, what certifications (if any) do you have?  How do you refill your tanks?  

A: Not yet.  That´s been disappointing, but hopefully that will change soon.  We all have PADI Open Water certifications, which is the basic SCUBA cert, as well as our own gear.  We have a compressor on-board (Max Air 3500) that Lauren bought because she expecially loves to dive and want to be able to do it when we want to.  Unfortunately, we´ve either been trying to make up time or in places where the diving wasn´t very good.  We´ll definitely post about our first dive.

Q: Do you ever catch your dinner fishing?

A: Lots of cruisers do this, and we´ve heard about a really great book on fishing that was written for cruisers by a marine biologist, but we don´t have a copy.  We´ve picked up tips here and there and have tried a line behind the boat, but haven´t had any luck yet.  Lots of people catch Mahi Mahi, Tuna, Dorado, etc. so we´re looking forward to our first fishing success.

Q: Have you gotten any better at wind-surfing? 

A: Another disappointing no here.  We need to stop being so lazy and drag the board to a place where the seas are reasonable and there´s some wind.  The water was a little nasty in Panama.

Q: And, most of all, how in the hell did you convince the girls to do this???

A: Books have been written on how to pull this off successfully.  Lauren read one called “The Sailing Promise” that was written by a woman who was blackmailed/cajoled/bargained/… into going with promises of marriage before and children after.  First I found a girlfriend then wife that I thought would give me pretty good odds at pulling this off.  It was just hard to imagine myself with someone that wouldn´t be into this sort of thing and I ended up being lucky.  In terms of the specifics, I´d always talked about something like this and we read some sailing books togehter that gave both of us a better idea of what it would be like.  We´d also travelled a fair amount together beforehand and knew that we both enjoyed travel and a basic lifestyle.  BUT, this is really a question that takes two to answer, so here´s Lauren´s take on it…..

Lauren here. I have always loved traveling, and I thought that this trìp sounded like an amazing opportunity. Actually, I know plenty of women who are just as adventurous as men, but like me, they probably have competing priorities such as the desire to have a family. As for me, I feel very fortunate to have the chance to have both experiences, since we are doing this early enough (just barely!) that we can have children when we return.