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December |
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31 December - Christmas & New Year
17 December - Colon
03 December - San Blas to Portobelo
31 December - Christmas & New Year
We took an overnight passage on 20th along with Pagos, from Colon to the San Blas and the island of Chichime. Here we met back up with our Aussie friends Mary and Demetrie on 'Adagio' and our other English friends Ken and Jaki on 'Osprey'. The overnight passage was pretty smooth, although the wind dropped as soon as we left the anchorage so had to motor, also Stuart thought the gear box was playing up so it was a bit of a pain to have to motor all the way. We made it without any further problems and got in at about 11.00 the next morning. We never had a moment to relax as, as soon as we arrived there every one popped over to say hi, which was really nice and felt very festive. It was a lovely cloudless day and the water was flat and clear so we all jumped in the water and had a bit of a reunion!
Pagos had caught a large Mackerel on the way into the anchorage, so we all went over the island in the evening with the permission of the Kunas living there and had a big bar-b and pot luck. In true bar-b style though as soon as we had it lit up, it poured down with rain! The Kuna's kindly gave us their cooking hut to bring the bar-b into and cleared us a space to eat in one of their huts. There was 12 of us there to eat the fish but we still had tons left so gave the rest to the Kunas. It was a really nice night with everyone getting back together, catching up on all that everyone had done since we last met and making christmas arrangements.
Christmas 2006
The days leading up to christmas seemed really busy and hectic! Most days began with George and Olly (Sue and Adrian's children) swimming over to the boat in the morning and staying until lunch, they were fascinated with the cat but alas the cat wasn't quite so taken with them and spent all the time growling, hissing and attacking!! The poor kids were quite scared of him by the time we left!
Click here to see the pictures
Christmas eve we had everyone over to ours, and had drinks and nibbles, it was a bit of a sport that whoever's boat we ended up on for the night, the men would always get very excited about the fish jumping around the boat and would end up fishing off the side. Most nights with pretty good results. Adrian caught a nice big 'Horse Eye Jack' this time which was put away in their fridge for a bouillabaisse for boxing day! The kids were all excited about christmas so it made it feel even more christmassy!
Pagos and us had decided that we would like to have as typical an English Christmas as we could, so before we left Colon we had stocked up with a large turkey and ham, mince pie filling, bits to make stuffing, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, huge jar of gherkins, mixed nuts and all the nice little christmassy bits that reminded us of home.
Christmas morning we had Mary and Demetrie over and had salmon bagels and salad for breakfast. Stuart and Demetrie started early and had rum in their coffees to begin the day, then slowly went onto rum cocktails whilst Mary and I had to slog away in our galleys cooking roast potatoes, cabbage, ham and fudge brownies. In traditional christmas style lots of things went wrong too, I burnt the brownies, Mary hadn't thought the potatoes would take quite so long as they did and was rushing up to the last minute and wishing them to hurry up. Sue cooked the turkey in the morning and only after a taste test did she realise that it had gone off, and we wouldn't be able to eat it at all for fear of death!! Very resourcefully though she had canned a load of turkey before leaving Colon so we all still got our christmas rations of turkey!
Christmas afternoon we all went over to the Island with the food and spent the day eating drinking and playing silly games. Sue and the kids made us all fantastic hats so we all looked suitable silly too! The day went past far too quickly as usual and we all sloped of home well after dark, all very tired, full up and more than a little fuzzy!
We managed to have a fairly sedate day on Boxing Day, in the afternoon we all went over to Pagos with some mulled wine and left over ham and had a lovely bouillabaisse for dinner. We then all sat down to watch 'The Life of Brian' on DVD, we all just about managed to keep our eyes open to the end then skulked back to our own boats for a fairly early night. On the way back to our boats we saw a huge fire glowing in the distance, which was far to big to be a camp fire. We found out the next morning that one of the islands nearby 'Soledad Miria' had had a huge fire and half the island had been wiped out.
Luckily no one had been killed but they were asking for anything people could bring to help, hammocks, clothes food, money etc. We all decided it would be nice if we were able to help, so upped anchor and sailed down to the island, we gathered together what little we had and took it to the saila.
We then began to help with clearing up the remains of the huts, clearing away all the ash and wood and whatever was left over. They had already cleaned up the majority, but it was a little strange as people only seemed to look after their own plots. Once their space was cleared up they all found some chairs and sat and watched their neighbours working! It was funny the way they dealt with us too, we would clear up one plot, then a family who had been sitting there watching would grab one of us and say, next you do mine!! I think it was a good spectator sport watching the gringos work! The army was there too but they were all just standing around watching. Mind you a lot of work had already been done so we don't know if it was the army that had done it or not, and everyone would have had a very stressfully night and worked extremely hard. As soon as a house space was cleared they were putting large army tents up in the space.
We finished up in the late afternoon and went back to the boat, covered in ash and dirt. The next morning a large navel ship came in with more supplies and they had had helicopters coming too and fro from the day before. They had it all completely under control and by the looks of it were all going to end up with a lot more than they had started with! Our help wasn't really needed so we sailed back to Chichime. Although the sail turned out to be more of a race as the men all got a bit excited, we were all healing over until our toe rails were in the water! We hadn't prepared for this so things went flying across the boat, poor Sue lost a liter of oil across the floor, then their hurricane lamp smashed on top of it! So from that experience we have learnt to batten the hatches when the boys get together in boats!
17 December - Colon
We are now in Colon and have spent the last week or so sorting out the cooker. We took a trip into Panama City and managed to have quite a successful day, we found the embassy without too much trouble and will receive Stuart's new passport in a months time (it cost nearly $200, which we think is pretty steep). They let you keep your old one, which is good so we can't get into trouble for not having ID. A friend of ours was taken to jail when stopped by the police, without his passport on him when he was taking his dog for a walk! They took him to the station where he managed to contact some other boaters. They then had to go to his boat retrieve his passport and bring it over to the police before they would let him go!
We managed to get a new cooker on this trip too, just a little one that is not made for use on boats so will probably not last too long but it will do us for a while. It only cost $50 and we managed to get the gas bottle and all the pipes to set it up for around another $50, so it worked out well. It is now fitted into the boat and is working well.
We have met up with some friends here, Adrian, Sue and their children George and Olly, these are the guys that we met in Cartagena who are also from Maidstone! Its been nice having them around, means I can do some girly things with Sue and the kids whilst the men do men's things! This time of year here there aren't many people transiting the canal so those who are all need line handlers. We were asked to help out with a German couple that we had met in the San Blas. I let Adrian take my place as they will be going through with their boat in the new year so wanted to check it out, so Stu and Adrian went off to do that for a couple of days, whilst me and Sue got to do some shopping.
We now have some plans for Christmas, we are off back to the San Blas in the next couple of days to catch up with our Aussy friends, Mary and Demetrie on Adagio and we are going to meet up with Pagos again so it looks as though we will have a nice time with friends this year. We also managed to get our christmas shopping done in Colon in a lovely big department store that has the cheapest things in I have ever seen!! The most expensive pair of women's leather sandals in the shop was $8!! So there will be pressies this year too, which is very exciting!
This is probably the last you will hear from us this year now. So hope you all have a fab Christmas and New Year and don't eat too much xmas pud!!
3 December - San Blas to Portobelo
We left the Coco Bandero's after catching a fair few fish and having some nice bar-b-q's, and we set out to Nargana (Rio Diablo Village) to see if we could buy a few bits. There was also some unusual weather forecast so we thought it would be a good place to hide out. We had to pay an $8 fee this time to enter the island which we didn't spend much time on as there wasn't much there. The bad weather turned up the second day here and we then spent 4 days trapped on the boat as it tipped down with rain solidly and the wind whipped around us. The holding was pretty good and in winds of up to 30 knots no one dragged. After the storm was over we heard a number of stories of people who weren't so fortunate, a few of the islands around here had been wiped out, a couple of the coconut carrying ships got washed up onto the reefs. A couple of enormous tankers got washed up onto the shore in Colon and apparently all the sail boats apart from 3, anchored there on the flats, dragged and a couple ended up on the beach. In Portobelo another 2 were sunk in Buenaventura. So it looks as though we got away pretty lightly.
We moved on from Nagana to Green island a shot hop away and spent a few days chilling out there. We weren't to know at the time but apparently there is a crocodile that lives on the island and pays some interest to the boats, a number of people have spotted him swimming around there boat. Arrrrrgh!! I was swimming around our boat!! Had I of known I wouldn't have set foot in the water!! We are thinking of heading back there at one point to check him out!
From here we decided to slowly make our way back to civilisation, to do a bit of christmas shopping (we are determined to have a better one than last year!) and to buy a new cooker or try and get ours mended, its a lovely big cooker although only one hob works intermittently now, so meals are a little bit of a challenge! We spent 2 nights in the Lemon Cays where we got trapped on the boat for a day due to another boat of rain that wouldn't stop. Then we headed back to Porviner to pick up a Zarpe to go to Colon, we managed to get totally ripped off again, much to our dismay. The usual guy wasn't there and the new one charged us $22, times previous it had only been $12 and we only had $27 left to our name! We paid but after thinking about it for a minute decided to go back and question him on it, his excuse was we had to pay him over time. It was 3pm on a Wednesday that we went to see him and he said, after 4 is over time. Stuart said but we saw you at 3. He quickly back tracked and said well its not my job I am doing a favor for a friend so its more!! Stuart said, well that's not our problem, but once you have let go off the money there is no chance in hell of seeing it again. We really have to toughen up a bit!!
We scrapped through our final pennies (it reminded me of being back at university and having to scrape through your collection jar of 5p's so you can afford a beer at happy hour!!) and managed to buy a few beers at the little hotel, that helped to wind us down a little. The next day we headed off for Isla Linton 45 miles away, we started nice and early at 6 in the morning but with the wind and current against us we weren't going to make it before dark so we nipped into Nombre de Dios on the way. This is where all the gold used to be taken before they decided that Portobelo was a much better spot, and I can agree with them completely, the anchorage had a constant 5ft swell coming in all night long, it was very uncomfortable. What with the noise of all the glasses banging from one side of the cupboard to the other and the oven banging on a loose lock, we didn't get much sleep at all. It was a relief to be leaving in the morning, even if it was into rain, thunder, lightning and a 10ft swell!! Oh the joys of sailing the Caribbean!!
We made it to Portobelo the next day and were happy to be anchored again. Very luckily we bumped into our friend John on SV Frijola who lent us $5 to get to the supermarket to get some more money out, we didn't have 10cents to our name! It was nice going back to the big supermarket, which now has all its christmas food on sale, we were very tempted to buy a Turkey and a load of stuffing but thought we'd better leave it until closer to the time!! We satisfied ourselves by buying a bottle of very cheap (and a bit nasty) Port to make some mulled wine with! We think we will head over to Colon in the next few days where we are closer to the city and may be able to get our oven fixed.