Panama – a nice surprise!  Wednesday, 14/12/2022

Had a fairly easy voyage here. Left at 10:00 on Saturday and arrived Monday at 13:30, not bad considering I covered 298 nautical miles. The first day was very rapid – there was stronger than usual wind, up to about 25 knots, and we were flying along nicely. At one point we had a pod of about eight dolphins racing us, leaping out of the water every now and again – they love that! The wind then fell a lot on Sunday, so the last third of the trip was fairly slow-going. 

The big surprise was approaching the Panamanian coast – it is a lot more attractive than I’d expected. There are high hills, covered in rain forest, which come right down to the sea, with mangroves at the waterline, and the coastline is broken by a series of small bays. Very scenic. There are some facilities for tourists, but not large hotels – small boutique hotels, hostels, chalets, that sort of thing, so there’s a very rural feel. Have come into Linton Bay Marina, which is just southwest of the most northerly point on the Panama coast. It’s a medium-sized marina, probably 60 to 70 boats tied up here. Manuka is on the inside of the jetty nearest the open sea. You can see out to sea, between Linton Island and Isla Grande. A beautiful location. There’s a fair bit of life here: there’s a bar/restaurant, a small very basic shop and a boatyard with its associated mechanical services. A fruit and vegetable truck comes every day in the afternoon – he’s well-stocked and also sells meat, milk and eggs. A 12-minute walk south takes you into the village of Puerto Lindo, where there’s a small supermarket. The fact that there’s probably another 80 boats at anchor each side of the marina is helpful – it makes a big enough market to support all these things. 

I dealt with Customs on arrival on Monday. I then had to travel 17 kilometres (11 miles) to Immigration. The customs guy said “tomorrow” – one of his few English words! Pretty relaxed. I took the local bus yesterday morning, which was a very “authentic” experience… music blaring and pretty clapped out – on a hill the driver was in first gear! When I reached Portobelo I jumped out and wandered for a few minutes until I found Immigration. The woman was very friendly, so it didn’t matter that the whole process was very bureaucratic – I was the only person there and it took 40 minutes because she was trying to get something confirmed by her head office down in Colon. She kept on engaging me in very rapid Spanish – I was lucky if I understood a quarter of it. Anyway, she eventually stamped my passport for 90 days… job done.

Then after a walk I waited over an hour for the next bus to show up. It was crowded so I was standing in the open doorway and hanging on for dear life as the maniac driver did his thing (60 miles an hour on the downhill, 5 miles an hour uphill!). There was a metal plate by the door identifying the bus as having been built by the Blue Bird Corporation in the US, who basically make those yellow school buses we’ve all seen in American movies. Built in 1980! Pretty impressive that it’s still going – not sure what that says about its safety! (I guess what happens is that the Americans retire the bus when it’s 15 or 20 years old, and it then gets sold in the Caribbean where it starts a whole new life as general public transport!).

One positive thing here: despite being a little south of Cartagena, it’s much cooler. For example at 11:35 this morning the temperature was 28, feels like 31 – whereas across the water in Cartagena it was 31, feels like 35. So a substantial difference, and quite a relief – it feels nice and cool!

There’s a very friendly atmosphere here. I’ve been in conversation with several people – including two South Africans who are building what look like flying saucers, which they intend placing in bays along the coast as luxury accommodation. Turns out that one of them is, like me, from Durban! Today at the fruit truck I bumped into an Englishman and his French wife who I’d met in the marina in Cartagena about four months ago, really nice people. And had a long chat with an American from Massachusetts who I met when docking on Monday – he’s the sort of guy who’s smart and knows everything that’s going on around here, so a very useful contact! 

I did sustain one bit of damage on the sail over – my sail bag ripped to shreds. That means that when I dropped the mainsail it fell out on the torn left hand side, hanging down onto the saloon roof. No great surprise, it was old, and finally succumbed to the vicious tropical sun – there were a couple of small tears in it already and it was clear that the material had become very thin. There’s a small sail loft here and hopefully I should be able to get them to make a replacement. With a boat there’s always something! So we looked a bit of a mess when we came in on Monday – the two guys who helped me dock were very amused. I told them I couldn’t be bothered to try and secure the sail nicely out at sea – not that easy when there’s two metre waves pushing the boat around: if you need to hang on with one hand it’s impossible to do something like lifting up a heavy sail and winding a rope around it to lash it to the boom. Whereas that was easy in the marina. That’s something I have learned: if you’re solo, don’t kill yourself by trying to do unnecessary things at sea… Instead, arrive looking a bit beaten up – it just adds to the mystique of the solo sailor!!!