Since our return to Panama late on Saturday, Team Shimshal have been working like Trojans under the hot, equitorial sun. Six coats of Copper Coat have been rollered onto all of Shimshal’s underwater bits making us compliant with Galapagos’ stringent rules on hull cleanliness. Greased by sweat, Tim has been squeezed into some of Shimshal’s most inaccessible spaces to perform engineering miracles that others had deemed impossible. Heather will soon be hard at work stitching zips onto solar panels, Sally has been mixing the antifouling with an accountant’s precision and I have been discovering that if I create a spreadsheet of jobs to be done, miraculously, jobs get done! Surreptitiously I have been adding more and more to the to-do list and I’m confident that by the time we reach Tahiti, our boat will be in fine fettle.
Our endeavours have been so successful we have declared Thursday a day for the mountains and some R&R in the cooler air of the cloud forest. Bring on the birds!
