Dear Friends
Our newsletter last month ended on a note of indecision. We knew we needed major work to be carried out on Songline’s hull, to eliminate the osmosis problem which we had uncovered while renewing her antifoul paint. What was much less clear was where we should go to have the work done. After a lot of discussion about the (somewhat limited) options available, we have decided to continue south to Ecuador. The boatyard attached to the Puerto Lucia Yacht Club, near Salinas, not far from Guayaquil, has the capability to haul out the boat, store it on the hard and, most importantly, carry out the work needed. We have received a number of good reports from people who have had similar work done there, and we are hopeful that Songline will receive equally good treatment. We plan to arrive in early March and to have Songline hauled out of the water, allowing the yard a couple of weeks to assess the full extent of the problem and to strip off as many layers as necessary of Songline’s hull below the waterline. She will then have to remain out of the water for as much as three or four months to allow the exposed area of hull to dry out fully, and then comes a six to eight week period when new layers of epoxy are applied, which are designed to ensure that the problem does not happen again.
So Songline will be high and dry for as much as seven months while all this is going on, which rather curtails our plans for exploring the Ecuadoran coast by boat! However, as with many clouds, this one has a silver lining - several, in fact. We had been hoping to make a trip to Sabah, Malaysia, at the end of March, to keep a date we had made twenty years before. On 1 April 1986, we got engaged on the top of Mount Kinabalu, South East Asia's highest mountain (13,455 feet). At the time we had the slightly crazy idea that it would be fun to return to the summit every ten years, to prove to ourselves that we were still up to it! We did the climb on 1 April 1996 (faster than in 1986, which surprised us!) and we would very much like to be back there on 1 April 2006. Now (legs and lungs permitting!) we can. On top of that, while we were in the middle of deciding what to do about our repair work, son Peter and girlfriend (now fiancee) Jilly were making much more important plans about when and where to get married. They have chosen 1 July, just outside Edinburgh, so we now have a very special trip to Scotland to look forward to at the end of June. And, to cap it all, now we know that Songline will be safely ‘moored’ on dry land we will be able to do some extensive land travelling in South American in the intervening months - principally Ecuador and Peru, but perhaps further afield as well.
Meanwhile, we are spending a month or so in Costa Rica, enjoying the beginning of the dry season in some of the places we visited earlier this year. We hope to move on towards Panama in a few days’ time, but it doesn’t look as though we shall get there before the New Year - and we’ll be spending Christmas a few miles away from where we are now, at Playa Naranjo, one of our favourite anchorages in the Gulf of Nicoya.
Barbara is busy baking and we look forward to mince pies under the palm trees and to raising a glass to all of you, wherever you may be.
We wish you all a very joyful Christmas and good health and much happiness in 2006.
With love and best wishes from
John and Barbara