Arrival in Panama!

       We pulled anchor on July 27th in route in Bocas Del Toro, Panama!!
        Man, we are so excited! This is the end destination for awhile, a place to stay put for a few solid months, we are looking forward to it! The winds are 15-20knots and the seas have a long period four foot swell.  We have our main up and our genoa out and we are cruising along at 6.5-8knots on a beautifuly sunny day with a sparkling ocean flying out behind us! Panama here we come! Just as the sun is setting that night, after a gorgeous day of sailing, we see some storm clouds building and as the sun dips below the earth we are not emcompassed by darkness because the sky is continuely being lit up by bolts of lightening.  The sky is half beautiful and half eerie.  We doubled reefed the main, reefed the genoa and ready ourselves for a potentially long night.  Just before 8pm a squall hits us, Gualby and crew handle it fine, we are less green now.  I might even call us a pinch salty.  Through out the night we don't get hit by any more big squalls but the amount of lightening the whole night is enough to keep Con and I both on edge.  Day breaks and the sun doesn't bring any wind with it.  We motor sail through out the day, using only the starboard engine.  We hope to remedy our impellar problem once we get to Panama.  Depending on the wind we are going anywhere from 3 to 7 knots.  The seas remain pretty calm with a slight, gentle swell.  We motor sail through out the day, constantly calculating and then recalculating when we will get to Bocas.  It is way more fun to calculate it when we are going 7 knots. Con still does it when we are going 3 knots, but I don't like to hear about it.  That's just captain info anyway.

       Shortly after midnight we enter the Bocas Channel.  Now, as a side note,  we normally never enter a harbor or anchorage at night.  It is just asking for trouble, GPS's and charts are wrong sometimes and you don't want them to be wrong at night, in a new country, not knowing the dangers of the anchorage.  However, that being said, our GPS shows the channel being very clearly marked and we are just to damn excited to not cautiously and slowly enter the anchorage and settle in for the night.  As we make our way through the channel I am searching each side of the boat with a spot light trying to see one of the markers while Con steers by our GPS.  There is not one damn marker to be found.  I find it hard to believe that ALL of the markers have been lost, maybe they were only put on our GPS with the belief that that Panama will install them in the actual water, but Panama forgot?   Even without markers we safely make our way closer to the marked anchorage.  We see the lights on the coast and hear music coming form the open air bars.  We spot other mast lights and make our way towards those.  The depths read 60 feet, then 20 feet, then 6 feet, then we hit bottom, then we got off the bottom, then we anchored.  We made it to Panama!!! Wa-Hoo!!  We hugged each other, wrestled the dogs, let out a sigh of relief, and cracked open a celebatory ice cold Blatz.  That might not have been my beer of choice if I was given a choice, but it was delicious and well earned none the less.  We stayed up for a bit, the excitement and anticipation making us giddy for the morning.  We are in Panama!

      We checked in the next morning with some very friendly, smile-y officials, paid our fees (after a very convenient ride to the atm from the custom guy who just happened to be going that way and then back to the office--I love this place), got our permit and that was it, we are officially in Panama!! Bocas Del Toro, Panama to be a little bit more precise.   What should we do now that we are official? Celebrate of course!  We hit the hippie, back packer town of Bocas with huge smiles on our faces and a thirst for local 70cent beers.  We met some good people, had lots of laughs, and led a skinny dipping party at a packed local waterfront bar.  It's good to be here, Panama, I think we might stay awhile.
M.

We took other photos with us smiling and posing but I think this one really just sums up how we felt at that moment.


A view of our new anchorage: