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CRUISING WITH ANDREW
Boca Chica, Panamá, Thursday, March 18, 2008

It has been months of hanging around Boca Chica’s somnolent anchorage with occasional trips into David, the local market town some 90 minutes away, to renew one’s Permiso de Marino (essentially a month-by-month Shoreman’s Card issued to visiting yachties), to re-provision and to use the cheap internet access in town. Time was hanging heavily on my hands, and, believe it or not, even the Great Procrastinator had run out of important boat projects to do. For too long I had been feeling like a slave to the bloody boat (pace Vilisar!) anyway.

Prior to Christmas, after a few weeks of heavy tropical showers each evening, the ITCZ had finally moved south towards Columbia and the friendly, drier, wintertime Caribbean weather with its refreshing trade winds had arrived. Huge thunderheads still formed up threateningly around Panamá’s mountainous spine between the Caribbean and us to the north and out over the sea to the south, but now they rarely boiled down to the Pacific to dump their rain.

Instead of enjoying this improved weather however, I was pining away in Boca Chica; Kathleen was away in wintry Germany to work on a musical in Frankfurt with her friends Debra and Sheila. Last year, house-sitting in Venezuela for seven months, I had plenty of visitors and I helped a German friend from time to time to run his posada (B&B) while he was away. I also had easy internet access to research articles I was preparing. Here, on the other hand, despite a pile of paperback books in all quality classes, it was just plain lonely at times.

Certainly a few other cruisers showed up from time to time, especially around Christmas, including yachts like Carina, IWA, Claire de Lune, Plan B, Harmony and others whom we had known in Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador. Others, like the junk-rigged Batwing out of Seattle, we had met in Mexico. Anna III, Copenhagen (Joergen & Judy), Aquastrian, Campbell River, B.C., (Dennis & Michelle), Fulle Polle, Bonn (Berndt & Renate), Luna, Panamá (Doug & Suleica) and Leonidas, Santa Cruz, CA, (Tom & Ann), I met for the first time and enjoyed. Rick & Barbara aboard Kirkham Annie out of Prince George and Vancouver, BC but now semi-permanently in Boca Chica are clearing land to build a small house on a nearby beach; they were especially hospitable. Suzie & Jim of Sparta and Marco Polo are permanently there, I guess you could say. Mike and Maria aboard Dragon Lady out of Seattle became friends too. By late February, however, most of the yachts had moved off heading north and home to the States, to Costa Rican haul-out facilities or towards Panamá City.

So there was quite a lot of coming and going of old and new sailing acquaintances. They would head out “to the islands” and come back in a week or so later to renew visas and re-supply. But, as much as I enjoy cruising islands, I don’t find it fun to cruise alone. I have also never been one for just taking walks or day-sailing. Not that I don’t like walking or sailing. Quit the opposite. But I have to have a purpose, a destination. When living in Frankfurt, for example, I did nearly all my errands by foot or bicycle, and only used the pubic transport for longer distances. But I never went just for walks. As for day-sails, they are like cleaning house; you need a visitor to get started in earnest and to make the floating apartment into a sailboat.

Andrew’s arrival

All the more reason than that I was eager to have Andrew’s visit over his Spring Break from college. A visitor on board! And a great person as well! And somebody who loves the boat and cruising! Maybe it is too much to say that he is ‘sail-struck’. But maybe it’s close to that. Getting to Boca Chica was going to be somewhat complicated: he was flying from New Orleans then changing at Houston for Panamá City. Then, in a strange country and with modest Spanish, he had to get from the aeropuerto to the bus terminal quickly to catch a long-distance bus to David. That bus trip takes 6 hours. What made it all the more complicated was that Andrew was also bringing two large packages containing our new tan bark sails. The price for the Lee Sails of Hong Kong included delivery to anywhere in the U.S.A. but not to Panamá. Seventy pounds in addition to his own suitcase! I can’t believe they let him on the plane without charging him extra! And Panamanian Customs passed him through without even a raised eyebrow, let alone a hand held out for a bribe.

I met him at the David (bus)Terminal around 2300 on Saturday night. I had taken a room in a backpacker’s hovel (-sorry, I meant hotel) and reserved a taxi to take us, the sails and several boxes of groceries that I had already purchased for the week out to Boca Chica the next morning. The bus arrived more or less on time. We got some sleep. The drive out the next morning was delightful now that the road in from the Trans-American Highway has been up-graded and gravelled in preparation for paving. At one time this was all tropical forest, but, although poor sandy stuff, the land was cleared years ago for ranching. The only virgin forest left at all in Panama is on the ex-penal colony island of Coiba, fifty miles out in the Pacific. It is now a national park. How’s that for upgrading? The gravel road was lined with ripe cashew trees and we stopped to eat some fruit picked from low-hanging branches. Delicious. (Each of the cashews you have to go with your beer comes from one fruit; the ‘nut’ - i.e., the fruit’s seed- hangs down below the fruit externally. This is unusual when you think about it since most stones or seeds in fruits are internal to the flesh. Although the fruit is delicious there is apparently no way to can it or otherwise preserve it). By noon on Sunday we were ensconced back on Vilisar, having taken a local wooden motorboat-taxi out from Boca Chica itself.

Bend on the new sails
The first big job is to strip off the decrepit, old, grey, salt- and sun-whacked sails. When we bought the boat in 2001, Roger van Stelle, the seller, had opined that we would probably need a new suit of sails soon. Well, that was well over six years ago and we have covered at least 10,000 Nm. He was right though. We just never had the lolly. Now, if we plan to sail to French Polynesia and beyond this year or next, we simply had to have new ones.

These new Dacron ones are beautiful. Tan bark (i.e., red to imitate the old-fashion cotton or canvas sails or yore). We mail-ordered them through Lee Sails of Hong Kong. (I can highly recommend Mr. Kwan, Lee Sails representative in Vancouver, BC. vancouver@leesails.com. The workmanship is first class and the price and service was everything one could want.) There’s a picture above of our new sails.