Chapter 10
We’ve taken up counting the seconds after we see lightning and before we hear the thunder. Sound takes about five seconds to travel one mile, so this gives us an idea of how far away the lightning is. It surprised us to find that most of it is a long way off and only rarely does any come within a half mile. Although one day in June during our usual afternoon downpour, we had lightning well within that distance. Actually it was within fifty feet. We know this because that’s the height of our mainmast and that’s where it hit! The flash and the thunder were simultaneous and the sound felt like a physical blow. Of course, the whole thing was over before we had a chance to start getting scared. Neither of us had felt our hair stand on end or anything like that. It wasn’t until we started trying the electronic equipment that we were sure that we’d been hit. As it turned out, we had to replace most of our fuses and that fixed almost everything. The major exception was our wind instruments. Later we found the melted pieces of our masthead anemometer strewn across the deck. We have since learned that a thunder storm is called a ‘tormenta electrica’ in Spanish. We certainly felt like we were being tormented by electricity.
Once you leave Mexico heading South, there isn’t a single dock where you can take on fuel and water until you reach Flamingo Marina in Northern Costa Rica. We have a watermaker that makes all the water we need out of seawater but we do need fuel once in a while. The day before we arrived there a hurricane several hundred miles away had sent an exceptionally large swell into the bay where the marina is located. The waves had caused a sailboat called “EOS” to drag its anchor and be washed up onto the beach. “EOS” had been at anchor there for a couple of years while her owner was in the U.S. working. Rumour has it that the marina was supposed to be taking care of the boat but since the owner hadn’t sent any money for a long time they weren’t feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility. So poor “EOS” was high and dry on the beach and nobody was doing anything about it. We thought that we might be able to pull her off on the next high tide but by the time we got there she had a huge hole in the side and was full of sand and water. Within days the vultures had stripped her of everything valuable and she was left to disintegrate on the beach. Sadly some of the vultures were other boaters.
Susan and “Daydream” ended up staying in Flamingo Marina for three weeks while I went home to take care of some family business. This is easily the dirtiest, most ramshackle excuse for a marina that we’ve ever seen. It’s been amateurishly built out of junk that floats up on the beach. In fact, the marina later made use of a few pieces scavenged from “EOS”. There are no showers or even bathrooms available. The electrical wiring would be comical if it wasn’t so scary. There aren’t even any cleats on the dock to tie up to, only some rusty chain loops just waiting to chew through your mooring lines. We suspect that the whole place would fall apart if the boats weren’t there to hold it together. It does, however, have the twin distinctions of being the only marina in Northern Costa Rica and having a world class collection of mouse-sized cockroaches.
Susan had to sit through a hurricane alone at this marina. Hurricanes don’t normally occur this far South in the Pacific, but, a Caribbean hurricane jumped the continent in Southern Nicaragua and just brushed the marina. Luckily she knew it was coming and had time to prepare. Usually this means using every line you have to hold the boat in position and taking everything you can off the deck. Because of the classy facility that I left her in, she felt that it was also necessary to place our inflatable dinghy between the marina and “Daydream” to protect the boat just in case the marina started to break up. She also put out an anchor so that when the marina gave way completely, there would be something to hold the boat off the beach. As it turned out the eye of the hurricane was far enough away that she experienced only light winds but had torrential rain for 48 hours straight.
We wanted to leave Costa Rica from Puntarenas, which is halfway down the coast of the country. We ended up in an embarrassing situation on a Friday afternoon when we managed to get ourselves checked out of the country but were unable to complete the paperwork for the boat. The whole process was wildly confusing. Legally we had to leave the country, but, the boat couldn’t! We solved this little problem by creeping out of town with the intention of coming clean in Costa Rica’s southern-most port of Golfito.
Later, we were glad that we hadn’t checked out at Puntarenas because a couple of hundred miles south we broke some rigging. This time it was a backstay chainplate that gave way. Fortunately we have dual backstays, so we were never in danger of losing the mast. This is the second major piece of rigging that we’ve broken since we left home and that’s two more than anyone else that we’ve met. I wonder what this means? For those of you who sail, it may be interesting to know that we were sailing upwind in flat seas with about 15 knots of wind at the time.
Golfito is the place they were thinking of when they coined the term ‘banana republic. The town was originally a company town for United Fruit and still has rows of identical company houses. The only industry is bananas and even that has recently fallen on hard times. The Port Captain here is a real character. Checking in and out with him is difficult because he only attends his office for a few seconds every day and as a result, you have to hunt him down. On the way in we got lucky and spotted him out on the pier meeting a Dole ship. On the way out we tracked him down having a two hour liquid lunch in a restaurant near his office. Other people have actually had to stake out his house to corner him! Even though Golfito is a muddy little town with a bad reputation for crime, we liked it. How could we not like a town that has a wonderful machine shop capable of welding stainless steel and a great pizza place.
Barbara and Whitey are an expat American couple who moved to Golfito about 10 years ago and started a restaurant. Several years ago they closed the business down because of hassles with the Costa Rican officials but they still live on the bay. We decided to visit them one morning. Their part of the bay has about six feet of water at low tide and 16 feet at high tide. We planned our visit for low tide and then foolishly went aground and got stuck. This can be a huge problem, but, since it was already dead low tide and we didn’t expect any kind of waves, we weren’t worried. We just put down our kickstand and went ashore for a quick visit. Barbara and Whitey have become modern day ‘Robinson Crusoes’. They live in a grass hut (about 2000 square feet) in the jungle with a nice beach out front. Other than the constant rain, it looks like a pretty idyllic existence.
Our first stop in Panama was at an island called Isla Parida. This is a beautiful tropical island with thick green jungle, white sand beaches and clear water. It also has a friendly little restaurant/store run by a couple from Vancouver Island. Most cruising boats in this area stop here for a while. This gave us a chance to catch up with old friends and hear all the latest scuttlebutt. One of the reasons we liked the place so much was that Dave and Sharon, who own the restaurant, show videos every evening.
The clear water was a pleasant surprise for us and we took advantage by doing some snorkeling and speargun fishing. These Northern Panamanian islands are very remote and unspoiled. The people who live on them for the most part are fishermen and coconut farmers and there aren’t many of them. We stopped at several islands and always had spectacular diving and quiet anchorages. We would have spent even more time except that Susan broke the tip of her middle finger one night. We weren’t even sailing at the time, she just dropped a hatch on it. The pain was pretty intense and there wasn’t much we could do beyond a little codeine. We’re pretty sure that a doctor couldn’t have done much more which was a good thing because the nearest doctor was about 24 hours away.
The last leg to Panama City was fairly short, only about twenty hours, but, we expected a relatively difficult passage. This area has the greatest concentration of shipping of anywhere in the world. The night before we had almost come close enough to two separate ships to shake hands with their crews and there were usually three or four ships in sight at any one time. Imagine being on a bicycle out in a desert and discovering that three or four, fifty story office buildings are lying on their sides and heading in your general direction at twenty-five miles per hour. That’ll give you some idea of what it feels like. In addition, our autopilot was broken. Our autopilot steers the boat on a set compass course and frees us up to navigate, check the radar, make food or whatever. Without it we would have to wrestle with the wheel virtually one hundred percent of the time.
On every passage there are different things that you have to be aware of but this one had just about everything. Ships, of course, which we consider our greatest danger. Also shrimp boats which behave very erratically but at least they are usually well lit and they provide a good radar return. Pongas are small open boats made of wood or fiberglass. They don’t show any radar return and usually have no lights. Pongas are about 30 feet long and might weigh 5 tons when they’re loaded with fish. The only reason that we don’t consider them a bigger problem is because we’re enough of a danger to them that they avoid us. Other yachts are not usually a concern, however, we have to watch for them as well. Usually land in the form of islands and rocks is not too big of a worry. The hard crunchy stuff is very tough on a boat if you allow the two to touch so we always have the best available charts and are very careful about our navigation. You can always get into trouble though. The first modern charts were made in the late 1700’s and many have never been updated from their first edition. The guys who drew these first charts were fantastically skillful sailors and cartographers, unfortunately their equipment was pretty basic. The result is that shorelines are quite commonly out of their charted positions by a mile or more.
Add to the above difficulties, the huge amounts of rain. Because of all the rain, the sea is always full of big logs, trees and flotsam of every description pouring out into the sea from the coastal rivers. Most of this stuff doesn’t worry us, but, some of the logs are big enough to cause damage and occasionally you’ll see one big enough to make a yacht out of. During good visibility we can dodge the dangerous stuff, but, at night in the rain we have to trust the odds, or if we are feeling unlucky, slow the boat way down.
The Bay of Panama is approximately 80 by 100 miles. The tide raises the water level in this bay by as much as eighteen feet twice a day. To move these trillions of gallons of water out to sea and back again every twelve hours entails some pretty substantial currents. These tidal currents are another important navigational hazard in this area. They are so strong that depending on their direction they can add or subtract 50% of the boat’s speed.
After taking all of these problems into consideration, we chose the best possible time and departed. For the first few hours the wind was very light and it alternately blew from every direction, then it would stop, then blow a little more, but, we were making progress. At sundown the lightning started. After a few months in Central America during the rainy season you pay no attention to lightning that’s more than a mile or so away and this was much farther than that. Unfortunately by midnight the storm had found us and we had the wildest night of lightning that there has ever been. If someone had made a movie of it, no one would have believed it. There was all kinds of lightning. There were long jagged burns that hit the water and looping flashes that went back up into the clouds. There were sheets that lit up a whole section of the overcast and a new one for us that we named ‘bombs’. These were small, brilliant, round flashes that were followed by one very loud bang. The thunder was equally extravagant and varied. Distant lightning has a low, slow grumble. Nearer it’s more like a reverberating booming rumble. When it’s right on top of you, say within a half mile or so, you hear a fast tearing sound followed instantly by one tremendous bang. We gave up counting the seconds because there was so much lightning and thunder that you simply could not determine which crash belonged to which flash. There were periods of ten seconds or longer in which we had continuous light.
One lightning strike is supposed to have the potential power of a small atomic weapon so storing the electrical power from one of these storms would clearly be useful. We don’t know how to do that but we do have a method for producing a nearly unlimited supply of adrenaline.
Naturally, rain came along with the thunder and lightning. There really should be a special word for this in Panama. It’s not like a big rainstorm, it’s not even like a firehose. It’s probably only slightly less water than what you’d get standing underneath Niagara falls. It actually rains over one billion gallons per day on average over Panama. It felt like most of it fell on our boat that night. The visibility during one of these refreshing little showers is very similar to being underwater. We could only see a couple of hundred feet and even our radar could only penetrate about two miles through the porridge. Oddly the radar would often get targets that we couldn’t pick up visually, but, we regularly saw the lights on boats that weren’t showing up on radar.
We finally anchored seven miles outside of Panama City at a great little island and town called Taboga. Taboga has a nice beach, restaurants, millions of flowers, dinner plate sized frogs and eight foot wide “sidewalks” that double as roads for both of the island’s cars. They also have a town generator that shuts down at 10 pm, two public phones and daily passenger ferry service to Panama City. It’s a really pretty island and looks like a great place to live although there aren’t many permanent residents. Most of the homes are used only on weekends and holidays by wealthy Panamanians.
Our next stop was the Balboa Yacht Club which is in Panama City and actually situated in the entrance to the Panama Canal. The Yacht Club itself looks like it may collapse at any moment and there are no docks to tie up to, just buoys. A buoy in this case is an old tire filled with foam and chained to a locomotive wheel down on the bottom. For the privilege of staying there we paid 18 dollars per day which is probably enough to rent a nice apartment in the city. Unfortunately it’s the only game in town and we needed a bunch of repairs so we had very little choice. We were certainly ready for a big city. We needed new anchor chain, a new autopilot, backstay chainplates, sampson posts and bottom painting. We had planned to paint the bottom by leaning “Daydream” up against a grounded ship at Taboga Island during a high tide and then painting the bottom after the tide went out. However, they had removed the old ship before we got there so we ended up doing it on the Yacht Club railway. The railway was fully booked for months in advance but they squeezed us in one night from 6 pm to 6 am the next morning. It took us all night long working by flashlight to get the job done. We sure hope that we never have to beat that 12 hour bottom painting record.
Panama City is big, modern and expensive. We spent almost a month there repairing things, ordering parts from the U.S. and filling up on movies and fast food. The city has a weirdly split personality. The Yacht Club is in the Canal Zone where everything is as neat as a pin. The grass is perfect, the palm trees are all in line and the roads and sidewalks are ruler straight and in immaculate condition. The buildings and houses are all well painted in Navy white and the people are carefully dressed. Two miles away on the other side of a police check-point is a very poor neighborhood. This is a scary place. When you go through in a taxi, the driver asks you to lock your door and he speeds through the red lights. All of the buildings have bars on the holes where windows belong and everyone looks hungry. You can’t see any weapons but everyone looks like they need one. Another mile further and you’re in the financial district. Office buildings here are 50 stories high, TGIFs and Burger King share a corner and everybody is in a suit, carrying a cell phone and riding in a BMW.
One of the most important things that we needed to do in Panama City was to repair our autopilot. We had done the last couple of passages on the way there without one and as a result we both needed a chiropractor. Because this is a major port, we had no difficulty finding a firm to repair it. It took a long time and cost quite a bit more than we expected, but, we were just happy to have it back. Minutes after we installed it, it failed again. The electronics repair shop said that, of course, it was under warranty and they sent out a technician to see what the problem was. He fiddled around for two or three hours then took the autopilot back to the shop. Four days later he returned, handed over the autopilot and said “Sorry, it can’t be fixed” (in Spanish, of course). “Hmmm” said we. “How about a refund?” Naturally, we’d have to talk to the boss about that.
We called the office and were told that the boss wouldn’t likely be back that day. We decided to stop in anyway since we would be going right past. Surprise! The boss had unexpectedly returned. She’d decided, she said, purely out of the goodness of her heart to refund half of our money. “Doesn’t seem quite right to us”, we said. “After all, we paid to have it repaired and understood that the work was guaranteed”. “Of course it’s guaranteed” said she, “but what about my costs?” This went back and forth for a while until finally she concluded that we were being unreasonable and stomped out.
We settled down on a really nice comfortable couch to wait it out. At quitting time the receptionist asked us to leave. We explained that we planned to stay and would be delighted to spend the night. The boss who had “gone home” earlier made another appearance. Either we would take what she had offered or she would have to call the police. “Excellent” we said “in fact, give us a telephone and we’ll call the police”. She stomped out in a huff. We continued sitting on the couch inflicting our Spanish on the receptionist.
Shortly thereafter the assistant manager made an appearance. After asking us to leave, he made us a new offer. It wasn’t all of what we had paid but by this time our ‘hunger strike’ was getting boring and we were actually getting a little hungry. We accepted and just as he stepped into the back room to have the boss (who had gone home again) sign the cheque, the police actually arrived! As you probably guessed, we didn’t have to do any hard time.
The preceding does NOT reflect our normal experiences in Latin American countries. They are extremely resourceful people and can fix almost anything. Usually the work is done very quickly and very inexpensively. Sometimes the price is so low that we wonder if they’re showing typical Latin warmth by reducing the normal price for us. Also, everyone is amazingly trusting. For example, we found a gentleman with a little shop on the side of the road (attached to his house) that had a sign indicating electronics repairs. This was in the small town of Puerto Madero in Mexico. We stopped and asked if he thought he might be able to fix the alarm on our old style depth sounder. He told us to bring it on in and he’d give it a try. He wouldn’t charge us a thing if he couldn’t fix it. After opening it up the next day he found out that he wouldn’t be able to fix it as it needed a new part. The darn thing is probably 15 years old so we weren’t surprised that he didn’t happen to have the part. But he did dig out another depth sounder from his jumbled back room and dusted it off. This was another old style, but still considerably newer than ours and it had an alarm. “Take it home” he said. “Try it out. If it works on your boat and you want it, you come back and pay me whatever you think it’s worth”. You can just see that happening at home can’t you?
It turned out that it worked just fine with our transducer and it’s really nice to have a spare depth sounder around. This story is much more like the hundreds of experiences we’ve had while repairing and buying boat bits and other things in Latin America.
In the 1880’s the Frenchman who had successfully completed the Suez Canal, Ferdinand De Lesseps, began the Panama Canal project in Northern Columbia. Thousands of workers died from yellow fever and malaria before the French company ran out of money and abandoned the project. The USA eventually bought the French company’s rights and equipment. However, they weren’t interested in spending huge amounts of money without some sort of guarantee so they encouraged a revolution, recognized Panama’s independence within hours of its declaration, signed a juicy deal giving themselves perpetual rights to a strip of land across the isthmus and then started digging. Before long they realized that that they had to solve the disease problems before they could successfully dig the big ditch. The U.S. army sent a doctor by the name of Gorgas who thought that both diseases were spread by mosquitoes. He cleaned out the mosquitoes and virtually wiped out malaria and yellow fever in Panama. Almost certainly the French would have built the Canal if these diseases were understood just a few years earlier. By 1914 the Canal was open for business. Today each ship that goes through pays around $30,000 U.S. for the privilege. This is a bargain compared to the time and the fuel required to go around South America. An average yacht pays about $50 US for the actual transit.
The Canal is a fascinating piece of engineering. Basically, the designers found a narrow place between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (40 miles wide) that wasn’t too far above sea level. Then they dammed the Chagres river, forming a huge lake that stretches all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This lake is about 80 feet above sea level. Locks were then built at either end that raise and lower ships from sea level to lake level and then back to sea level again. The only other major problem was a range of hills that stood well above lake level and through which a channel had to be cut. This channel needed to be over nine miles long and 300 feet across at the bottom. Its depth varies with the terrain but is several hundred feet for most of the nine miles. In order for the walls to stand, their angle was set at 20 degrees. The result is that in places the top of the channel would be more than ½ mile from side to side. They say that enough material was removed to build a tower 30 feet across and 2000 miles high.
The locks themselves are amazing. They are 1000 feet (almost ¼ mile) long by 110 feet wide with about 80 feet of depth. They have immense, floating iron doors (each of which is 65 feet wide by 80 feet tall and seven feet thick) at each end that look like the doors to a giant’s castle. To raise a ship, they close the doors at either end then open a tap. The lock then fills with water by gravity from Lake Gatun. As the lock fills, the ship rises. Once full, one door is opened and the ship moves into the next lock. To lower the ship, the process is reversed, except of course the water drains out. As large as these locks are, about 5% of the world’s ships are too big to fit. Consequently, there is some talk of expanding them or building another canal elsewhere.
These locks hold a lot of water, all of which is supplied by gravity from Lake Gatun and is then lost into the sea. Lake Gatun is supplied with new fresh water entirely from rainfall in the surrounding watershed. Believe us when we tell you that it rains a lot in Panama. Each ship transit requires 53 million gallons of fresh water and with 30 ships going through each day, the canal uses about 1.5 billion gallons per day.
In the late 1970’s, U.S. president Carter signed a treaty which promised to return to Panama the entire Canal and Canal Zone by the year 2000. While we were there thousands of acres and hundreds of buildings and facilities were being ceremoniously turned over. Many people were expecting the sky to fall as a result. We, on the other hand, were hugely impressed with a country that would voluntarily give up one of the most valuable assets on Earth to prove a principle.
“Daydream” didn’t get to go through the Panama Canal but we did go through with Harry and Petra on “Thetis”. The transit was actually a little boring. The locks are very exciting and nerve-wracking, but, they only occur at the beginning and the end of the transit. In between there is nothing to do except steer the boat and watch the passing ships and jungle. We did have one exciting moment though. When a yacht arrives in a lock, the canal line handlers are about 30 feet above on either side of the lock. Because the lock is so wide and the yacht is so narrow, they are about 50 feet away. They have to send four lines down to the yacht, one for each corner, to hold the boat in place as the water comes in. To accomplish this they have a very light heaving line with a heavy compact knot in the end about the size of a baseball. The idea is to throw this ‘monkey fist’ to the boat. We, the line handlers on the boat, theoretically catch these lines, tie them to our heavier lines that are then pulled back up to be secured to the wall. These canal line handlers were all sullen, unhappy gentlemen who looked like they might enjoy a bit of sporting fun. We probably shouldn’t have been surprised when they threw their ‘monkey fists’ with what seemed excessive force and apparently aimed them at our heads. We were all taking evasive action, hiding behind whatever was available. There is some pressure to catch these lines and to do it quickly as there is a huge ship sidling into the lock right behind you and you need to get a move on. One problem is that these missiles are coming in from both sides and you need eyes in the back of your head. Another problem is that the helmsman of the yacht is not catching lines but concentrating on driving. On “Thetis”, Harry was driving and was completely exposed to the incoming missiles. As fate would have it, one of the ‘monkey fists’ got him squarely on top of his head, knocking him off his feet and leaving a big goose egg. We’re pretty sure that the canal line handler in question won that week’s office pool.
We have some Russian friends in Panama on a $400 sailboat who escaped from and cannot return to Russia. They literally don’t have $10 to their names or even passports. They have no way of making money, and because they have none, they never bother with the proper immigration procedures when they arrive in a port. This is partly because there are always port and immigration charges and partly because they don’t have all the legitimate paperwork for the boat and themselves. The result is that they have been deported from Mexico and Costa Rica and have been illegally in Panama for over two months and will probably eventually be deported. Interestingly, in all of these deportations nobody has put them on a plane back to Russia, they just tell them to leave the country on their boat.
The Kuna Indians of Panama are really interesting. They’ve managed to preserve their culture and land to this day and recently obtained some degree of sovereignty from Panama. The women seem to conduct most of the business so we saw quite a bit of them in Panama City. They’re incredibly colorful. They wear brightly colored handmade blouses called molas, leggings made entirely of beads and large gold rings in their noses.
Panamanians all seem to have a unique first name. Most places that we’ve been to, the people have pretty standard, familiar names. Lots of Miguels, Marias, Juans, Jorges, etc. In Panama, however, there is hardly a name that you’ve ever heard of or can even pronounce. They have a particular affinity for X’s and Z’s. Some that we were able to pronounce were Rigoberto, Marure, and Fayre. This last is said ‘Fay-ray’. When we mentioned that my sister’s name (Faye) is very similar, Fayre became quite upset, insisting that her name was an original!
Our destination upon leaving Panama City was the Las Perlas Islands which are quite difficult to approach or visit. They are a collection of 227 main islands and hundreds or perhaps thousands of smaller rocks. They’re only 40 miles from Panama City but they have never been accurately charted. They have tides of 18 feet or more, tidal currents that sweep through the islands at 2-3 knots and very poorly protected anchorages. From our point of view the fact that they are so rarely visited makes them very interesting. The Spaniards cleaned out all of the pearls hundreds of years ago and since then no one has been able to come up with a good reason to live there. They aren’t completely uninhabited though. There’s a small resort on the island nearest to the city. Then there’s a tiny village on another island where the villagers lead an extremely basic life of fishing, farming and hunting iguanas. The iguanas are an important food source in Panama. There is also an abandoned (we hope) drug smuggler’s air strip. This air strip is well known and being only a few minutes by air from the Panama City police and a U.S. airbase you wouldn’t think that it would still be in use, but, one afternoon a Lear jet overflew our anchorage at an altitude of about 200 feet. We’ve been scratching our heads but we can’t come up with a single logical reason that a Lear would be that low 40 miles from the nearest airport. Finally, there is a German couple who sailed here 11 years ago. The Germans have been squatting in the islands ever since and no one seems to care. We didn’t get to visit their island but we were awakened one morning at the Yacht Club in Panama City by the strangest cries, which turned out to be Deiter’s new goat tethered in the cockpit of his sailboat.
Leaving the Gulf of Panama turned out to be much harder than getting there. We had strong wind coming from exactly where we wanted to go, a very strong current pushing us back and ship after ship squeezing us up against a dark rocky coast as they rushed to and from the Canal. Not far from the Bay of Panama is a point called Punta Puerco which means Pig Point. We figure that it’s called that because it’s such a pig to get around. After two days of fighting, we finally got past Pig Point and things got easier. We rewarded ourselves after a hard passage by buying two huge, fat lobsters from a fisherman for five bucks.
We stopped in Bahia Honda, Panama for a few days. This is where some friends of ours on a boat from Vancouver bought land and became teak tree farmers. This whole thing was really fascinating to us and so we questioned Ross and Louise about it pretty closely. Here’s how it works. Most remote, roadless land in Panama is not titled. However, you can have a titled issued so they found a piece of land that they wanted, knocked on grass huts until they located the owner, confirmed his ownership by talking to all of the neighbors, bought the land, flew in a surveyor and had a title issued. Then they had the land cleared and planted with teak tree shoots. In about 20 years they’ll own millions of dollars of teak! In addition, their land is on a pretty, Pacific beach inside a very nice bay.
Bahia Honda also has a little village of about 500 people which we visited one night. It has one telephone and one building with electricity. There are no cars, roads, mail service, police or sewage systems. Every house is lit either with candles or flashlights after dark and the phone always has a fairly long line. We also had a chance to visit a farm here because we were out of fruit and vegetables. Since there is no store to buy them from, a farm is the only option. This was a pretty cool experience. You could see right through the farm house since it was built very loosely of rough planks. There were no doors, windows or floors and the furniture was limited to one chair, one rickety table, a cupboard and numerous hammocks. In addition to the family, the house was heavily trafficked by dogs, cats, geese, pigeons, ducks and a bristly little boar that seemed to enjoy licking my feet. When Domingo, the farmer, paddled out to our boat in his dugout canoe and told us that he had vegetables for sale, he hinted pretty heavily that his kids would like some sweets if we had any. We dug around and found some chocolate to take along when we went to his farm. We always buy candy “for the children” but it often gets eaten by our parent’s children. The chocolates were in a big, fancy, sealing mason jar that we had bought pistachios in. We were happy to get the glass off the boat so we’d have one less thing to break. Although the family definitely appreciated the candy, we suspect from their reaction that the mason jar may have pride of place amongst their dishes.
Our shopping trip resulted in 100 bananas and many other assorted fruits and vegetables. You may be wondering why we needed 100 bananas. There are actually three reasons. We were just about to start a fairly long passage in which the only available groceries would be freshly caught fish. Second, Susan makes great banana bread and unbelievable banana smoothies. And finally because we got three different types of bananas, all at different stages of ripeness, it would be possible to use them all. The first bunch were about five inches long and triangular. They took four days to ripen forcing us to then eat about 30 bananas in two days. The second bunch was about the size of a large thumb and they were purple. When they were ready to eat they were pink and tasted a little like apples. They took eight days to ripen and then we each had to eat 15 bananas in two days. The third bunch were what we think of as normal bananas. We must have done something wrong with this bunch because they went right from green to rotten on the 14th day. So far we haven’t noticed any ill effects from all these bananas although we do have a strong urge to swing in the trees.
Because of weather concerns at this point, we were in a rush to get back to Mexico. When we left Northern Panama, the plan was to sail directly to the most northerly port in Costa Rica. There, we’d stock up on food and fuel and leave immediately for Southern Mexico. The trip from Panama to Playas del Coco, C.R. should be about four days of upwind sailing. Normally this would be very hard, slow work. We were fortunate and had gentle winds and most importantly very little rain.
On this trip we had two memorable experiences, both involving ships. The first was with a cruise ship called “Legend of the Sea”. All ships and boats under power have a red light on their left side, a green light on their right side, and a white light that shines all the way around. The bigger ships have two white lights, one at the front and one at the back positioned higher. These lights enable us to figure out which direction everyone is headed and whether or not they’re going to get too close to us. Unfortunately, cruise ships are often lit up like small cities and the result is that you can see them coming from a long way off but can’t always tell precisely which direction they’re headed. This particular cruise ship had taken a run at us when we were leaving Panama City. Then, we had been able to see their red light, a mass of white light and a bluish green light. Its lights seemed to indicate that it was heading straight for us. We called them on the radio and they very kindly turned to avoid us. The second time, in the middle of the night, we first saw a glow in the sky. Shortly afterward a small city of light appeared on the horizon and headed generally toward us. Because of its turquoise colored emblem (which we had mistaken for the green steering light previously) we recognized it as “Legend of the Sea”. Once again it looked like it might run us down, and once again they obligingly turned when we called them up. “Legend of the Sea” does a regular run from LA to Miami via the Panama Canal so we won’t be surprised to see it again.
The second ship pulled an optical illusion on us and caused us to break one of our most cherished rules. The rule is that we will go to any lengths to ensure that no ship ever has an excuse to run us down. This one appeared in the middle of the night and we could see that we were on a collision course. However, because of the unusual angle that we were closing with it, we thought that it was a large yacht or a fishing boat. As a result, we chose to alter course to pass in front of it. Of course, we would never even contemplate turning in front of a ship. We were actually never in any danger but you can imagine our consternation when the ‘yacht’ turned into a 700 foot ship and passed within a few hundred feet of us!
When we stopped at Marina Flamingo to get fuel, the electricity was out so they were starting a gas driven generator as we pulled in. Once they got it started and could run the pumps, they filled the generator with gasoline, while it was running! This is a gas station version of Russian Roulette, but, obviously nothing exploded. Later as we were leaving the gas dock we went aground for a few seconds. This was the second time ever for us and both times have been in Costa Rica.
Our friends Jim and Marie-Paul and their kids (also our friends), Rita and Paula, were in the marina so we stopped to say hello and ended up staying for dinner. Marie-Paul is French and a fantastic cook (these things seem to go together) so it didn’t take much convincing.
Having landed in Costa Rica we needed to report ourselves to the Port Captain, Immigration and Customs authorities whose offices are in Playas del Coco. The surf in Playas del Coco was running three or four feet that day. Since there is no dock, you have to take your dinghy through the surf and up on to the beach. Big surf means you are either going swimming or possibly just getting soaked. We did both and got covered in sand to boot. A certain amount of skill and luck are required to time a surf landing so that you don’t dump. It seems that we had neither that day.
When it came time to leave Costa Rica for Mexico, we had had almost a week of rain free weather. We figured that the rainy season was finally over. Of course, it began to rain on the day we left. Rather than fight it, (it’s very unpleasant to sail in the rain) we anchored and settled down to catch up on our reading. After three days of solid rain, we decided that it might not ever quit so we left anyway. This trip should have been upwind and therefore slow and uncomfortable, but, instead we had a steady 15 knots of wind on the beam, which is a very pleasant point of sail. Instead of four or five days of slogging uphill, we did the run to Puerto Madero, Mexico in 3½ days. Best of all, within about 20 miles of the Mexican border we saw the last of the rain. Unfortunately, now our world-class mold collection is drying out! We found out later that we were getting this great wind from an out of season tropical depression, which was preceding us up the coast. These depressions are the embryos of hurricanes but this one soon fizzled out and disappeared.
You’re going to find this hard to believe but we had 12 people (including ourselves) for Christmas dinner on “Daydream” in Zihuatanejo. We had Vic, Nancy and Kyle from “Charisma” (USA), Robert, Lynn, Allison, John and John from “Flying Wings” (Britain), Alonso from “Isla Romantica” (Costa Rica) and his ‘girlfriend de jour’, Maria from Zihuatanejo (Mexico). It was a little like the United Nations. For dinner we had a huge smoked turkey, salad, mashed potatoes, gravy, rice, homemade bread, pumpkin pie and fruit punch. Just like home except there wasn’t much snow and the temperature was in the low 80’s after sunset.
