S/V L'ORIENT

Dinghy on the deck, diesel on the deck and jacklines set OK guys, sh_t's getting real now. Our weather guy for the South Pacific (the venerable "Bob") has told us that our weather window opened 2 days ago and closes on Feb 17. Yikes! Scramble the fighter jets...we've moved up our departure 3 days, which has thrown L'ORIENT into utter chaos. More fuel, and more canvas than Ringling Bros. Food, fuel, wine (of course), parts.........everything must be purchased and on the boat YESTERDAY! We rented a car and have been buzzing around Panama doing our errands at top speed. The good news is that we've caught up (to a degree). We think we're 95% ready to go. We will see. Our pride and joy- the 95 liter fuel bladder (aka "big bladder") The busy days have prevented us from dwelling on the 600lb gorilla in the room. Panama City to French Polynesia non-stop ? 4200 miles? 30 days at sea? What are we thinking? We've had hours of con

Stop..........pretty please ? So, our ambitious plans call for getting to French Polynesia. Visions of Tahiti, Bora-Bora, and tropical islands are now dancing through our heads. We conveniently block out the small issue of a 30-day non-stop sail from Panama City to the Marquesas. But the first issue...L'ORIENT needs to change oceans. We've enjoyed the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea for 9 years now. But faced with the choice of sailing around Cape Horn or paying $2,100 to transit the Panama Canal, we did what most sane people do and signed up for our transit. Because of the luck of the schedule, we were NOT nested in the locks with similarly sized sailboats. Instead, as no sailboats had requested January 20 as a transit day, our lock-mate was decidedly bigger. Not sure he even noticed us as we were constantly about 30 feet from becoming fiberglass kindling. Goodbye Caribbean... The concept seemed deceptively simple. Go in the lock, close the gate, fill/drain the