Feliz Navidad from the cats and crew

Boat ride from Guna Yala

Panama City (the billboard is for Meg)

In Costa Rica for passport stamp

 

Rugby scrum at the border; my friend Judy is waving in back.

Panama City again for shopping; kitchen at the Cruiser Casa

Back in the San Blas

Oliver here speared two dog snapper yesterday, and shared one with us.  Cats were happy to do the cleanup.

Wind season!  This is Aurelio windsurfing- the kite surfers are out in force, too.  
Some high seas, so not good for the stand-up paddle board.  But nice and cool all the time.

It's so calm this week that we've been swimming outside the reef, where the big fish are.  And every day we come across the same herd of 25-30 enormous parrotfish (we haven't carded them, but assume they're the same fish).   We usually find them by following the clouds of parrotfish poop, visible from a long way off.  They're prodigious coral munchers.

Colorful spot in the swimming pool.  The shallow water makes it a great place to see rays and other creatures.

The Guna congress assign a family to live on the island of Yansaladup- this is the 19-year-old matriarch.  She lives in a large one room shelter with her husband and baby and 16-year-old niece.  In March, she'll be able to go back home (she's counting the days) when another family takes over.  The anchorages most favored by tourists always have a family designated to live on their islands.  Otherwise, we tend to set up barbecue pits and picnic tables, and start tidying the place up.  This makes the Guna leadership nervous.  

We're in Panama City buying groceries and other necessities of life.  This building is just down the street- its facade is covered with plants.  It's usually dripping when we walk by.

The bread goddess:  the other day Gretchen from Infinity came over with her bread-making tools.  We made:  pain au levain, pain a l'ancienne, and rye bread.  I didn't realize how gentle you need to be with bread, and how attentive- there are many steps.  And next time, you'll want to remember what you did wrong.  It requires something of a mad scientist temperament.

The veggie boat!  always happy to see the veggie boat.  This is Geraldo and Co.  This time they had fruit, veggies, and eggs- no chickens, though.  We're stocked now for the week.

Getting back to the basic blogging categories:  cute children, exotic sea creatures, brilliant sunsets.  These girls were between classes in Nargana, and happy to play on the iPad with me.  Actually, four of them were spinning in circles trying make themselves dizzy, but when I tried to take a picture, they sat down politely and posed.

Had one of those wonderful days when everything I touched turned to shit.  Started out getting slammed by my anchor trying to untangle the chain in the water, then I hit a large coral head going full speed.  Sprang a leak in my shaft log, and then trying to stop the leak, I picked up an extension cord while standing barefoot in salt water and got shocked so bad I couldn't let the cord go for a good 5 seconds.

Kiss my ass, Neptune.

Mike making nice with Neptune

a lovely wedding

When passing through Panama City, lots of people we know stay at Cruisers' Casa, a modest apartment that offers a shared kitchen, laundry, and security.  We didn't realize until we got here that the view goes on for days.  Very magical.  I am not one of those people who says 'oh, our hotel room doesn't matter- we're never there except to sleep'.  The weather has had us indoors a lot, and it's been very tolerable here.  We go to DC tomorrow.

If we go swimming late in the day, we seem to see more big fish.  Usually nurse sharks are found sleeping under a rock, but we followed one for quite a while at dusk the other day.

We have not posted much recently because the internet connection here is spotty and we're not really doing much besides swimming and hanging with friends. We're now in the Kuna Yala region of Panama, a semi autonomous nation ruled by the Kuna Indians. It runs from the Columbian border to just about the canal on the NE shore and includes the coastal mountains and about 300 islands. They do not allow ownership of land, development, hotels, scuba diving, surfing, kite surfing, wind surfing, on and on, Nada, Zip. There is one road to Panama City, so it is possible to go there shopping for the day, but that's it for 200 miles of coast. A few towns with huts that sell stuff, but they do come around once a week with fresh veggies and fruit and such so there is no real need to go anywhere. We're anchored out 10 miles from the coast in a coral reef with about 10 boats. A friend got a grouper the other day and we have been eating off it, the cats too. The locals bring us their cell phones to charge, and load us up with all the fresh coconut you could want. The towns have great medical clincs and unlike other parts, there is no petty theft. Also no Dim Sum, but we coming to DC and SF soon and will load up.
Come on down if you want to kick back for the rest of your life.

Hanging in the Kuna Yala, San Blas Islands
Rain, our only crew, left today for Panama City and other adventures- we will miss her knack at taking underwater pics with a $30 camera. We're off to the Coco Bandersas islands to see some friends before they head for Providencia. Things are getting quiet here as the snow birds head north for the summer.  Supposed to be rainy and very quiet.

We're going from one island to another, spending a lot of time in the water.  The place is relatively undisturbed, so you see healthy coral and big fish.  In the afternoons there are lots of rays, always fun to see.  Yesterday as we were anchoring one appeared in a new color scheme, with black and white patches- probably a manta.  We immediately jumped in the water, and saw this guy swimming by.

Now we're in the lovely low-bandwidth San Blas Islands.  Lovely and friendly.  The Kuna are always paddling up to the boat trying to sell things -mostly molas, but also out-of-season lobsters, which no one here buys, and the occasional fish.  There are separate fruit-and-veggie boats that ply the anchorages every few days.  Other cruisers come over to check out the new boats- yesterday, an Italian woman we know from Roatan actually swam over to visit.  It seems like more European and fewer American cruisers, and more relaxed than other spots.

Portobelo

Portobelo has lots of home-grown murals.  Curious to know what these ladies are up to ...

a few more:

We left Bocas last Monday, stopping at Crawl Key, Bluefields, and Escudo Veraguas.  Rock outcroppings and caves run along the north side of Escudo.

From Escudo we had a twenty-hour trip to the Rio Chagras, part of the canal watershed.  Here's Nilaya leaving the island.  

Rain, our crew, going up the Chagras.

When we left the river, we crossed the Panama Canal near Colon.  Here's a faster boat cutting across our path (or his, actually).  We came about hard.

Now we're in the lovely town of Portobelo, where some boats bring their own cocktail waiter.

Well, goodbye from Bocas- we're checking out this morning and heading to the San Blas Islands.  Rain Guo is crewing with us, and Jim and Laura on Nilaya will be on the same route.  Probably making stops at Bluefields, Escudo Veraguas, and the Chagras River.  It's hard to log on to the web in some of these places, but we'll try to stay in touch.

Tutti, a Ngobe-Bugle girl from Chiriqui Bay, with a white-faced monkey.  There was a music festival this weekend, and so local people, cruisers, and assorted sea gypsies all came to Loma Partida.

Same girl, better photographer.  And the monkey's a black-capped Capuchin.

Back at De la Luna for a couple of days along with a few other boats.  They're such great cooks here it's hard to resist.  They grow most of their own fruits and vegetables, raise chickens, buy the rest from the locals.  We throw in whatever we've brought from town- lamb, shrimp, whatever's exotic.  Results have been impressive.  

Since Friday we've been anchored in the Gulf of Chiriqui with several other boats from Bocas.  On the shore is an eco-friendly-sustainable resort called De la Luna, home to all manner of species.  A series of thatched-roof huts climbs up the island, populated by goats, chickens, dogs, monkeys, local indians, and expatriates from all over.

 Michelle (in yellow) chief lunatic here, with general manager Rain

 

Just went on a hike around the Jackson property, a twenty-acre site the Smithsonian acquired recently.  They grow chocolate, pineapple, coconut, and many frogs.

Lorenzo cuts his arm and gets stitched up at the hospital.  Dumb move with power tool.  And we were two hours outside of Bocas when it happened.  Fortunately, cruisers have a radio network for emergencies, and were very helpful.  12 stitches, $12 (antibiotics included).  Socialized medicine, rah!

uh- oh, garbage wars!  Bocas residents have had it with their sporadic trash pickup.  Friday was the day they all dropped their garbage in front of the Mayor's office.  It was quite picturesque, blocking all four entrances to city hall.  In a tourist town like this, where everyone drinks out of plastic bottles, trash is a big deal.

Today we walked across the Costa Rica border to get our passports stamped- it's a ritual every six months here.  There used to be a requirement that you stay three days on the Costa Rican side; now it's three hours.  Once CR stamped our passports, we asked them, can't we just turn around and walk back across the bridge to Panama?  The answer was NO.  So we spent a few hours eating, taking buses, and trying to spend Costa Rican change.  Then we met up with more cruisers for shopping in Panama (much more fun when there's twelve of you!) and the water taxi back to Bocas.

The police station here in Bocas features this great mural.  And out back, a sport fishing boat seized for drugs.