This edited blog covers our cruising in PANAMA and the SAN BLAS ISLANDS in 2008. I have edited out some items of the general blog and put them on other more directly related pages. The blog runs chronologically backwards, as it were, with the latest entries for 2008 first and the earliest last.

From the Skylax blog 03-03-09

Panama Canal Yacht Club is closing

There will be a lot of sad cruisers around when the news that the PCYC is closing, nay has been demolished by the port authority, and officially will exist no more from April 1st. Even sadder is that new cruisers will have little alternative to Shelter Bay Marina now PCYC has gone. Where will cruisers anchored in the Flats Anchorage be able to leave their dinghies safely? Or have a beer, or an all-day breakfast or chilli beef, or talk and trade...

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01-01-09

Panama Canal

A couple of short vids of going through the Panama Canal that somehow escaped going up when we went through - probably for the good reason that they are not going to make you explode in a belly-laugh or cower in the corner for the sheer horror of it all.

27-05-08

Miraflores Lock

These photos were taken from the observation platform at the last double lock before the Pacific (the Miraflores Lock) by Peter Metherall. Thanks Pete!

Skylax and Kaama rafted together coming into the first lock

Going down

Second lock

And so into the Pacific

25-05-08

SKYLAX ARRIVES IN THE PACIFIC

Yesterday we chugged through the last lock, Miraflores double lock, and then the short distance under the Friendship Bridge to the Balboa YC where we were lucky to get one of the last moorings going. I'll do the Panama Canal transit in a bit more detail later, but for now we are taking it easy, sorting out a bit of official paperwork, and looking at the Pacific which here looks pretty much like the grey overcast Atlantic we have just left. Still along with Keats I'm looking with wild surmise, not from a peak in Darien but at the peaks around the anchorage and the Pacific lapping on the hull.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
    He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
    Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

     -- John Keats

                                                             Miraflores lock, and then the Pacific

25-05-08

Balboa

Annotated Google Earth of Balboa

Balboa YC: Moorings @ 50 cents a foot by arrangement with the office or try on VHF Ch 06. They are often full in the busy season March to May. Bumboats (Ch 06) run 24 hours to and from the pier and you are prohibited from using your dinghy. Fuel and water dock (approx 3.5 metres at low tide). WiFi to the anchorage. Bar and restaurant ashore. Also a Country Inn nearby with a TGI Fridays (not great).

Playita anchorage: Reasonable protection except from west sectors when it can get very bumpy. Dinghy dock with water ($5). Restaurants in Playita.

Flamenco Marina: VHF Ch 10. All facilities at $1.50 a foot. Fuel dock. Restaurant and bar.

For more annotated Google Earth maps go here

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25-05-08

A caution on Colon

I think some of us were getting a bit cocky about walking into Colon. OK I only did it a few times, always in the day, and tried to keep to known safe areas though I did stray a few times. I had one incident which might have turned out nasty for me, but I kept walking, kept the guy talking to me while I walked, and said I'd give him a dollar when we got to the gates of the PCYC. It worked. Two days before we were leaving Kris, a tough wiry and streetwise South African who is delivering a catamaran with his partner Mary got stabbed while coming back from Colon. It was 7 at night and in a fairly public thoroughfare. They wanted his backpack and stabbed him three times while trying to get it off him. No warning, no requests, just kept stabbinbg until they got the backpack. He has two deep wounds in his back and another more serious one in the chest which has punctured his lung. He is in a bad way in hospital and I wish them all the help any of the gods out there can give them.

So just remember, Colon is a bad place. Take a cab, it will only cost a buck or two.

                                                                               PCYC, the safe haven in Colon

Panama’s buses

Panama’s buses are a riot of colour flashing through the streets of the cities and towns and along pot-holed rural roads connecting villages and towns and the two cities of Colon and Panama City. They are the transport link that keeps Panama going and prices are low. A two trip from Colon to Panama City is $2.50. The buses are painted with motifs and scenes in vivid central American style and depict everything from religious figures (JC and Moses are prominent), bucolic scenes of houses in idyllic Alpine landscapes, fantasy scenes with witches and demons and computer game warriors, pop-stars, cartoon characters, and lots of pouting busty girls. The buses are all named: Lazarus (raised from the dead remains of another bus?), lightening, snoop dog, and of course lots of girls names. The buses are mostly Internationals like the yellow school buses in the USA.

 OK, how does the driver see out of the window?

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Colon Panama

Flats anchorage: Anchor in 11-14 metres. Soft mud bottom. Anchor chain in here for more than a week or so is stripped of its galvanising in the toxic soup of the harbour.

PCYC: VHF Ch 74. Alongside & stern-to berths. Around 45-55 cents/ft/day. Dinghy dock for $2 a day. This is the only secure place to leave a dinghy. Includes water from a nearby tap. Fuel dock. Railway sledge up to 20 tons. Restaurant and bar. WiFi. Laundry. Tito, a 'fixer' for the canal will be found here, or at least one of his 'helpers'. A tatty but very convivial place and close to supermarkets and hardware shops (take a taxi around $2-3)

Shelter Bay Marina. VHF Ch 74. Around 150 berths up to 40 metres or so. Secure. Fuel barge. Water and electricity. Around 45-55 cents/ft/day. Restaurant and bar. A new marina with a yard and hauling. A bit out of it though a bus runs into Colon and back every day.

If the PCYC lease is not renewed this is likely to be the only show in town.

For more annotated Google Earth maps go here

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11-05-08

UPDATE ON TRANSIT AGAIN

NEW DATE 22ND MAY

09/05/08

Colon to San Blas

Gotta get out of town

While Colon has it’s attractions, and I do like the place, the anchorage in the flats is beset by wash and grime drifting over the docks and onto the yachts at anchor there. For most things in Colon you take a taxi, most rides are a couple of dollars, because there are parts of the city that are dangerous. In the time we have been here we have heard of at least three yachties who were mugged. You don’t go out at night. That said I’ve walked into town a few times to send a fax, get petrol and some other little jobs, and as long as you are street-wise, stick to the main streets, and walk with a purposeful manner, it seemed OK.

Once we had sorted a few work things back in the UK via the internet and completed some boat jobs we hauled up the anchor and after a good half hour cleaning the chain off, set sail for Portobelo. This is the bay where Drake based himself while sacking Spanish cities up and down the coast and he reputedly buried at sea off a small islet at the entrance still called Isla Drake. The scourge of the Spanish Main, sacker of cities and privateer for Queen Elizabeth terrorised this coast and for centuries mothers would keep the kids in order by telling them El Terrible Drake is coming to get you. The Spanish then fortified the bay although that didn’t stop Henry Morgan from sacking it nearly a century later.

We anchored under San Fernando fort where the jungle comes right down to the waters edge and howler monkeys occasionally can be heard at dusk. The town across the way has basic shopping although you wouldn’t leave your dinghy over there at night.

The coast up to the San Blas has anchorages aplenty in small bays on the mainland coast and behind islands, though we only stopped overnight at Isla Grande. Although the weather is reasonably settled with light trades from the N-NE, at this time of year small lows come off Columbia bringing rain, lots of rain and thunder and lightening, but nothing wind-wise to worry about although you get occasional light westerlies.

You clear into the San Blas at Porvenir where the Kunas charge $12 per person to cruise around the islands. These are more cays than islands with fringing coral protecting anchorages. As long as the sun is reasonably high in the sky you can see the reefs and passages through  them. It is no place to rely on electronic charts.

 Puerto Yate

As soon as you arrive at Porvenir the mola ladies in their ulus, dugout canoes, arrive to sell molas. They are pretty insistent and you will often have two or three canoes holding on to the boat and mola ladies imploring you to buy their molas. Yeah, course we bought some. After that it’s bon-bon and caramello request time for the kids in the canoes. Apart from one strident lady who told me to get out of the water, (I was cleaning the prop), and get some money to buy her molas, its all pretty amicable.

Home on the cays is a lot of wooden and bamboo buildings with a few more substantial coral block and limestone buildings and some of the alleys between the houses are so tight you need to stand aside to let others through. Toilet facilities are a little hut on stilts perched over the sea.

We sailed around the Lemon Cays, back to Porvenir and the other cays nearby and over to Chichime Cays. I’ve got to be honest here. There are only so many white coral sand beaches fringed by coconut palms that I can take. Three to four days is good for me before heading back to places that have a little more human activity going on and are in their own way just as beautiful. So we sailed back to Portobello and in a day or so will head back to Colon to give John on Quequeg a hand to go through the canal. You need to have four line-handlers apart from the skipper so other yachties generally give a hand to one another.

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09-05-08

ULUS

Ulus are the wooden dugout canoes paddled and sailed by the Kuna Indians. Anyone who has ever attempted to get in a dugout canoe and paddle it will know just how unstable these things are. In Haiti it took me 15 minutes to get the hang of it and to work out that the canoes are asymmetric so you paddle them on just one side. Canoes here in the San Blas also appear to be asymmetric though it’s difficult to see when you look at them.

The rig on the sailing ulus is usually lateen with a tiny jib or a crab-claw type sail like those used on proas in the Pacific islands. Often you will have a guy who hangs out on a rough rope trapeze to keep the ulu upright. They sail around the cays and reefs and between the cays, often up to 4-5 miles from home. I’ve read somewhere that C A Marchaj in his tome on sailing rigs and aerodynamics reckons the clab-claw rig is the most efficient sail to windward, though I’m not sure whether that applies only to proas or to dugout canoes as well.

Anyway these things scoot around all over the place and are surprisingly efficient to windward given there is so little under the water to stop leeway. I guess the slim shape helps. Steering is just by an oar out the back of the canoe. Most of the sailing ulus are fishing out over the reefs and it’s unusual around the cays not to have one or two coming up to you with a selection of fish or crayfish and crabs to sell. I have to say we were a bit crayfished-out by the time we left the San Blas.

08-05-08

Outboards

Before we left Colon a week ago a couple of outboards were stolen off yachts in the flats anchorage. Both of them were lifted up on davits and the outboards chained on with 8mm stainless chain. The outboard thieves have taken to carrying bolt croppers to cut chain and cable. Here in Portobello I’ve just been talking to the unfortunate Mario off Valuda who had his outboard stolen a few days ago. It to was chained with 8mm stainless chain to the dinghy which was tied on to the back of the boat. He found the dinghy ashore minus outboard so the thieves were obviously not interested in the dinghy.

It’s standard practice here in Panama and in quite a few other places I can think of to lift your dinghy up out of the water alongside the boat and use cable or chain to lock it on. This seems to work better than davits though it’s not the complete answer. In risky areas we quite often lift the dinghy with outboard right up onto the foredeck and then lock it on. Alternatively we hoist the outboard up onto it’s mount on the pushpit and then just put the dinghy sans motor on the side or on the foredeck. Since we sleep aft we should hear someone trying to break the padlock and cut the cable to get the dinghy off the pushpit. To my knowledge none of these guys have boarded boats to steal the outboard off a dinghy.

We do have a slight advantage in that the thieves seem to be after outboards over 10hp so a smaller 5hp like ours is less at risk. I know several cruisers here that have sanded the ‘1’ off a 15hp to make it look like a 5hp.

While the locals get all the blame it’s sometimes your fellow cruisers you need to keep an eye on, sad as that may be. In Isla Grande we waved cheerily to a young couple returning to their boat in the anchorage. We got a surly look as a reply and a half-hearted wave. Soon after they departed to a green steel boat anchored inside the reef-bound harbour. I didn’t think too much of it until we went ashore and wandered around to the harbour. The young couple were energetically loading bits of boat equipment from the steel boat, which looked neglected but seaworthy, into their dinghy. They returned to their own boat after dark and loaded all sorts of gear onto their boat. Now their may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, but their behaviour did seem furtive and they left early in the morning the next day. Still I didn’t notice any spare outboards lying around the deck.

30-04-08

UPDATE

Either the power of the pen or some angel was looking down on the boats here. After a meeting of the canal authorities all dates have been advanced by nearly a MONTH. Our new date is May 28th. Thanks to Dick Durham at YM for his journalistic skills.

Hurrah

28-04-08

Dick Durham at Yachting Monthly gets on the case for the Panama Canal Authority hostages on www.ybw.com

Canal zone

30-04-08

AIS

On watch you need to keep an eye on any nearby shipping and if it looks a bit iffy then give them a call on VHF to establish their CPA. This always led to conversations like ‘motor vessel in approximate position da-de-da this is sailing yacht Skylax in position da-da-da on a true course of daa, over’. Sometimes we would get an answer and sometimes not. So when I was back in the UK I bought the simple stand-alone NASA unit and a VHF aerial for Skylax.

We had it fitted in no time and connected up to the GPS below despite the primitive little instruction manual that comes with it. Like most NASA stuff it has it’s limitations, but for the price it is a grand little receiver and does what says on the box.

On the trip from Sint Maarten down here to Panama we only used the radar once. The rest of the time the AIS provided sufficient information to establish a CPA and when we did call up, we had that all important handle, THE NAME OF THE SHIP. Over seven days we probably called up half a dozen ships to establish a CPA and they all answered. For other ships, and remember we are on the rhumb line for ships approaching and leaving the Panama Canal and ports in Columbia so there were a fair number around, we had sufficient information from their position, course and speed to establish that they would be well clear of us.

It also has the benefit of drawing very little power compared to the radar that we would normally turn on to establish distance and course relative to us. It has a few little niggles. Lu finds it hard to get used to a N-up read-out compared to head-up. It occasionally gets a bit flustered and loses the GPS signal, though re-booting the GPS plotter usually sorts that out. And it has no on and off switch so Lu installed a little push-pull switch so it can be turned off independently – the breaker feeds other instruments as well.

So for £200 I give it full marks and it suits my KISS philosophy keeping all instrument systems separate rather than linked. We could have bought an AIS engine that came up on the Garmin plotter in the cockpit, but that would mean a hardware or software failure there would shut down not just the plotter but the AIS as well. I also installed a separate VHF aerial on the pushpit instead of a splitter to the masthead VHF aerial. This gives us a spare aerial for the VHF should anything happen to the masthead unit and despite no being very high, we have had signals from ship up to 16 miles away.

22-04-08 In 'The Flats' anchorage at Colon

Wi-Fi in the PCYC...

More Passage Food

22-04-09

Counter-knowledge and the red tops

When I mentioned to Paul Gelder that the new Yachting Monthly web site had the same name as mine he suggested Dick Durham would put a link in. There were no heavy issues here, my website is a small insignificant thing compared to the Yachting Monthly site which has the whole editorial team on it's side. And I wasn't too bothered. But no-one was talking about plagiarism or rip-offs or even a minimal amount of hubris. Just to set the matter straight Dick - though apologies to you if it was someone else...

YM blog

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