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We enjoyed several good meals at the restaurant while at Shelter Bay Marina because we were trying to conserve our tiny residue of propane (the result of the still unidentified leak) and were getting rather tired of cole slaw and cereal.  We saw Sea Star waiting patiently for Dan and Kathy to return from their brief trip to the USA.  It was actually a bit sad to see their boat and miss them but we left them a note as a little surprise for their return.  We did, however, find two people that we knew, Larry from Miss Kathleen (we had met at the Eastern Hollandes) and Brian from ‘Uhane whom we had first seen in Providencia but had got to know in Bocas.  The cruising world can be a small one.  We were sorry to miss their wives (both visiting family in the USA) but we enjoyed swapping stories and learning more about Shelter Bay, Colón, and canal transits from them.

Wednesday was a wet day with thunder and lightning during the early morning so there was some doubt as to when we could refuel, especially as there were due to be several large power boats ahead of us.  But by mid-morning the lightning had gone, the rain was light enough to allow refueling under umbrellas, and when the second boat in line failed to show up on time the dock-master allowed us to jump the queue.  We were thankful as the diesel was pumped out of a barge in the marina and we had been a bit concerned that the bigger boats might take most of the supply (as had happened when we could not get diesel at the marina in Georgetown, The Bahamas).  The refueling process was quite efficient and we congratulated one of the two attendants on his excellent taste in hats…he was wearing a baseball cap with a Florida Gator logo on it.  He did not seem to know it was related to the University of Florida and we have seen several of these caps around (such as at a bus stop in Boquete) so the alligator logo without any words seems to be popular in Panama, the land of crocodiles.

By the time we had finished refueling and eaten lunch it was not difficult to persuade ourselves to stay a second night and hope for clearer weather in the morning.  We left at 6 am on Thursday turning away from a very dark line of rain clouds that were east of Colón.  Our progress that day and night was good although the headwind and current limited us to using the motor.  During the afternoon, a barn swallow starting circling the boat and attempted several times to land on the life-lines but the boat was bouncing a bit too much into the waves.  Finally it came into the cockpit and landed on Randall’s big toe as he was sitting back reading.  Oh, to have had the camera handy but I was sure that getting up to get it would disturb our visitor.  Instead, it then decided to look around inside the cabin and disappeared from sight.  We had heard several people talk about small birds making such explorations so we were not entirely surprised by this turn of events.  In boats that have cats aboard, the outcome is not always good.  I put a saucer of sugar-water out on the counter and the swallow flew in and out a couple of times.  At one point I saw it chirping away on the top of the wall-mounted TV/DVD player but by nightfall we were pretty sure it was in the forward cabin but decided not to disturb it.

During my watch from 10 pm to 1 am the sky was actually clear.  It was good to see the myriad stars and we felt confident that we would complete the 140 nm passage from Colón to Bocas by mid-morning on Friday.  But during Randall’s watch the headwind increased and storm cells that he was watching on the radar seemed determined to find us, darkening the sky and by dawn dumping yet more rain on us.  As the winds increased to 20 – 25 knots with gusts to 30 knots, the waves built up to 6 – 8 ft with a very short interval so we were crashing through them without much rest.  The current against us was back to 2 – 3 knots such that even at increased engine speed we were down to about 2 knots of forward speed over ground.  Depressingly, our estimated time of arrival in Bocas receded from noon to midnight and there was no indication that trying to motor-sail on tight tacks into the wind would help.

Luckily, there was no lightning, we had a full tank of fuel, and the conditions were not scary in any way but without the aid of the auto-pilot it was tiring to hand-steer and we were thoroughly fed-up with this frustrating passage to Bocas.  We had not been able to get a local weather forecast the day we left Colón so the last report we had heard was for winds to be “light and variable” which these conditions were conspicuously not.  We kept hoping it was a large squall that would soon pass but nothing changed and we feared that it might even get worse.  We considered the option of tucking in to Laguna de Bluefield (28 nm east of Bocas) for the night and then trying the inside passage, out of the pounding waves, the following day.  But the wind direction might have made the anchorage uncomfortable and the shallow reefs of the unfamiliar inside passage need calm waters and sunlight to be negotiated safely.  So with Randall nobly taking longer day-time watches, we slogged on directly to Bocas.  By late afternoon the current and winds slowed down just enough for us to manage to 3 – 4 knots of speed over ground and we thankfully entered the Bocas del Toro channel in the dusk at 6 pm.

It was particularly good to see familiar landmarks and to turn away from the wind and waves.  Although it was almost dark by the time we arrived at the anchorage off the Bocas Yacht Club and Marina there were fewer boats than when we had left in September and we were able to anchor where there was good holding and we had plenty of space.  Even though we had looked forward all day to dining ashore, by the time we finally arrived we could not muster the energy to put the dinghy in the water and instead used a little of our precious remaining propane to cook some instant noodles.  That night we went to bed really early and slept soundly for almost 12 hours.

On Saturday morning we reacquainted ourselves with the staff at the marina office, met Dillon and Darion from the Cantina, and realized that there were only a few other people around that we knew.  But it still felt as though we were “back home” in Bocas and that was good.  We heard that the weather that we had contended with the day before was the remains of a continental cold front that had unexpectedly swept down into the tropics, several hundred miles further south than predicted. We suspect that our barn swallow may have been a migrant heading south that was caught in the front.  Although those winds might have helped to blow it southward it was probably worn out by the time it visited us because we eventually found it, wings peacefully folded, behind some books in the forward cabin.  We were sorry not to have been able to provide it with a temporary respite from the storm but felt that it had found a secure “cave” in which to collapse, exhausted.  Rather dwelling on our overnight companion’s demise, however, we marveled at how any such light-weight and fragile creatures can survive their long migrations and we greeted the mid-morning arrival of some mangrove swallows, cheery inhabitants of this anchorage, a little more heartily.