TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Back in Panama City after our fishing contest and trip to Las Perlas were aborted on Wednesday, we kept ourselves busy. Greg will be stuck in Panama City for a few weeks while he waits for a new water pump for his engine. We have had enough wind recently that he was tempted to sail to the islands without power but it might limit where he could anchor. And he could be stuck in one place for a while if the winds quit for several days, as they are wont to do at this time of year, as illustrated during Tom and Rosie’s stay. Instead he is organizing various fun projects such as polishing the hull, working on his outboard, etc.

The winds were suitable for us to have headed out to Las Perlas on any of the last few days but I got caught up in trying to book a flight to Britain for two weeks in November (Randall will nobly stay with the boat) using frequent-flier miles. A procedure that would have been relatively easy from our home in Gainesville, it took me several days of phone calls, email, and faxes to get the whole thing sorted out, with sending a fax being the most complicated aspect. It was only at the fifth place that claimed to send faxes that we actually found a functioning machine that could be used to send a fax to the USA and this was located at the national bus terminal. Ah, the joys of international travel…maybe it is time to get a scanner so we can send faxes online.

We also did not have any luck trying to find a replacement for the broken nozzle on our dinghy air-pump. However, we did work out that we could still use the pump on the high-pressure valves, it just takes two of us as one person has to hold the hose in place while the other pumps.

It was not all frustrations, however. During our expeditions to find a functioning fax machine and the correct nozzle we did, at least, vastly expand our knowledge of the Panama City bus system. Each trip only costs 25 cents so even with several route changes it is much cheaper than using taxies all the time, as we had done previously. It is very interesting to see what is going on inside and outside the wildly decorated buses, it is just less comfortable and, inevitably, a multi-route trip takes much longer than by taxi. We are not doing Alberto out of a job as there will be plenty more days of shopping at a complicated series of places, for large loads, or in some dodgy parts of town when we will be only too glad of our helpful taxi driver.

So by Saturday morning, we seemed to have all our purchases, had my tickets booked, and amazingly, still had favorable winds. With rather choppy seas, fishing was sacrificed for the trip but that did not matter as we enjoyed one of our best close-hauled passages ever. We have never been able to sail all the way to Las Perlas or back before and with steady SW winds between 14 and 21 knots it was probably one of our fastest crossings. And as a bonus, even with all the boat’s motion and the white capped waves, we saw several humpback whales breaching or fin-slapping

We anchored on the north side of Contadora where it was a bit rolly but we were unexpectedly rewarded with wireless internet access on the boat (from the adjacent resort), hence this blog post. This afternoon we will head to Espiritu Santo so we will be away from the internet for a week or two but it is surely good to be back in clean water and out in the islands again.