s/v Jedi

Ready to depart Panama

Today was a hectic day here in Portobelo. We completed the formalities with the Port Captain and immigration and are free to leave as of 3pm today. Surprisingly we could complete everything here in Portobelo without the need to visit Isla Linton. We still had a lot of work to do, like installing mizzen reefing lines, jack lines, re-tighten new V-belt on the engine (was already slipping after 3 hours use since install), pilothouse window cleaning etc.

The weather forecast is showing lighter conditions every time it’s updated so we’ll just have to see what we find offshore. This is the first time we use PredictWind and I’m still downloading the good old weatherfax images to compare against. Hopefully we’ll be offshore with the next update!

Preppers: Stranded car survival

There are many scenarios where one can be left stranded with the car like extreme weather, car failure, road accidents, or mega traffic jams that happen with mandatory evacuations like we recently saw during the hurricane season. We've all seen the reports of people barely surviving or worse.

In order to survive such an event in relative comfort, I have create a bag that holds essentials for two persons for a maximum of 24 hours. We have two of these in our car to cover a total of four persons.

This is a gallon-sized ziplock bag that holds two quart-sized ziplock bags. One of the bags holds emergency drinking water and the other holds the rest:

• 2x mini comfort bag (see previous blog posts)
• 2x Mylar emergency blankets (Amazon link)
• 2x Mayday 400kcal emergency food bar with 5 year shelf life (Amazon link)
• 4x Mainstay 125mL portions of emergency drinking water with 5 year shelf life (Amazon link)
• 1x packet of Kleenex tissues (Amazon link)
• 1x miniature LED light (Amazon link)

When you look at the mini comfort bags you can see that we upgraded these with miniature tooth brushes that have built-in toothpick and toothpaste (only adds $0.20 to the cost). 

Depending on how and where you buy the items, the cost will be between $15.00 and $25.00 so let's average and make it $10 per person to survive 24 hours being stranded in the car, which is a no-brainer imho!