Daily updates sent to us via Sailmail from Chris. By using the downloaded grib files and weather discussions and backing it up with Chris's emails we should be in good shape.

It's nice to have someone interpret weather information that does it for a living.

Our last passage from Portobello to Bocas Del Toro was not fun. Tropical discussion said that the front should peter out long before it reached us, it didn't but stayed almost to the San Blas. Our better judgement said we should have made the passage a day earlier just in case it was wrong but it was so nice in Portobello we stayed taking a chance on it would be alright. It wasn't. I think that if Chris said we shouldn't wait that extra day we would have listened to him. We ended up 100 miles shy of Bocas when 40 knots of wind hit us at 10 PM. The wind didn't bother us that much but by 2 am we had 12 foot+ and short confused seas from the quarter. That's when it got snotty. The boat handled it better than us as it didn't throw up.

Chris might have had a different opinion about the front dissipating,, or,,, not dissipating as it did.