Brining in the New Year...in Palau

We tried.  We really tried.  We just couldn’t pull it off. 

We checked out with Customs and Immigration around 10:00 on Friday and were underway by 11:00.  It’s about 16 miles from Sam’s to the west pass.  We were about half way to the pass when the autopilot went out.  We pulled into a little cove and dropped the anchor so Andy could work on it.  The motor was dead.  Luckily we had an extra.   It took Andy a bit but he finally got the new (old) spare installed.  We spent the rest of the day contemplating whether we should go or turn back around.  The spare had been sitting there for years…and it was an older model than the one that broke.  The last thing we wanted to do was hand steer the 510 miles to the Philippines.  I know lots of people do it, but we didn’t want to.

So, to make a long story hopefully not so long, we spent the next two days hiding out in our anchorage while Andy fabricated some parts to another motor trying to get us another “spare.”  On Monday morning, we had made the decision to give it a go.  Everything worked great until we were about 10 miles out of the pass.  Both motors broke within 15 minutes of each other.  We decided to turn around.

Jake, painting his dinosaur bones from a kit he got for Christmas
while Andy worked on the autopilot.

Our last sunset in Palau...or so we thought.

So here we sit, back on our mooring at Sam’s Tours, celebrating the new year.  There are definitely worse places to be stuck waiting on parts, right?

Here are some pictures from our last days before we checked out...

Saying good-bye to Sam

Last beer at Sam's

Exhausted after a day of provisioning