a wee update

hi everybody! we´re in panama city ...again....at our fave dive hotel. hey, we may be broke and broken down, but that doesn´t mean we can´t enjoy the hell out of TV, square beds, air conditioning, a pool, and a distinct lack of mosquitoes....anyway...we linehandled on a friends´ boat to get here. much prettier than the bus, plus we got fed on the way here, got to see the canal again (our first atlantic-pacific transit), and had a great time. the canal is so beautiful!

tomorrow we´ll rise bright and early to meet Joe the Mechanic, and, if luck is on our side, the tranny part will be ready and will be up to snuff this time, and if it is we´ll scoot over to his shop at Pedro Miguel locks (so cool!) to reassemble our transmission. if everything goes together okay, we´ll take the tranny back to shelter bay. then we´ll find out if the new part actually works, after we spend a day or two reinstalling the transmission. if it works, then we´ll attempt to figure out if that was the main problem in the first place.

(if none of this makes any sense, here is an analogy: tomorrow morning we´ll get up, and if our horoscope is favorable and all the planets are properly aligned and we win the lottery, we will have the privilege of building a working space shuttle out of toilet paper rolls and popsicle sticks, and we will attempt a moon landing, all on a $7 budget. except it will actually be way more fun than it sounds, because we are in Panama.).

we´ll probably stay in shelter bay for at least another 2 weeks or so because we have run up a backlog on canvas projects! no kidding, we spend every waking hour in shelter bay at the sewing machine (well except for daily volleyball from 2:30-3:30 of course). it´s a steep learning curve. suffice to say it is paying our rent. well, on the days we don´t put zippers in backwards. more on that later.

for now, thanks everybody for helping us out with our engine trouble and we´ll post more soon!