Travels
from Jan. 10 to Feb. 2, 2002:
Ahoy,
This
edition spotlights the transit from Panama City/Balboa to Ecuador, across the
Equator into the southern hemisphere, virtually into the South Pacific. But first I must touch on the stay in the
Panama City area.
We
remained at the northeastern side of the causeway to Isla Flamenco during our
3-week stay at the Canal Zone. At this
time of the year, the winds tend to blow through this anchorage from the north
or northeast. When it is the latter,
the anchorage can become very exposed to waves reaching 4 - 5 feet, making the
anchorage uncomfortable if not dangerous. But the holding for the anchor was excellent for us and we chose
to stay there to take advantage of the easier dinghy landing and stowage, and
the proximity to cruising friends. The
alternative was to go to the other side of the causeway where the causeway
blocked the waves, but was exposed to the monster wakes of ships
entering/departing the Panama Canal, as well as having no place to beach a
dink, let alone leave it. Boats that
drug their anchors in our anchorage, or couldn't handle rough waters, moved to
the sheltered side.
The
view of Panama City was unhindered from our anchorage. During the day the skyline of high-rise buildings
reminded us of large Californian ports.
At night, the lights in the high-rises made it even more spectacular. Frequently, fireworks would erupt over the
city to cap off a wedding celebration or other private festivity. We never tired of the view.
A bus
would pass our anchorage every hour (mas o menos), going to Balboa (25˘) or
ending in Cinco de Mayo section of Panama City (40˘). In Balboa there is a Laundromat that actually uses hot water to
wash clothes, an Internet café ($1.50/hr), a small tienda and a copy shop
(charts $1.80 each). The larger supermarkets
were quite far away, requiring taxis or several hours on buses. The taxis cost from $1.50 to $3.50 depending
where we caught it. Once we paid $5 because
we had 4 passengers and a trunk-load of groceries. A smaller supermarket was close to Cinco de Mayo and we went
there often.
Also in
the Cinco de Mayo area was a walking-mall several blocks long. There you could purchase ladies' swimsuits
for $1, jeans for $5 and shoes of all sorts at very low prices. Here we found Sunbrella marine fabrics,
electronic-parts stores, the black-market for purchasing tobacco products and
other such things, bakeries and another Internet café.
There
are many luxurious malls in various parts of Panama City. There are many excellent restaurants as well. We went to one Chinese restaurant that made
us Szechwan beef even though it wasn't on the menu, although they recommended
against Mushu pork because the cooks didn't like to make it . . . but they
would have made it if we asked. At
another restaurant that our friend Ramon treated us to, we had the finest seafood
soup and entrees we have had in a long time; the quality would have given San
Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf major competition. This food had to have been prepared by a highly trained
chef.
The
most comprehensive West-Marine-like marine store offered complimentary coffee
or sodas. We received good service from
every establishment. When we bought bottom
paint for Nanjo, we were quoted a price much higher than we had been quoted in
David. When I expressed my displeasure
with the quoted price, the salesman did some quick tapping on his computer keyboard
and showed me a price almost 40% lower, slightly below my David-quote. When I purchased new batteries, I asked for
and received a discount. However, the
produce prices are slightly higher in Panama City than they were in David. Not that I will get any sympathy from you,
since instead of getting two bananas for 5˘, we had to pay 10˘. But we were directed to a bulk produce
market to provision for our voyage south.
There Nancy split an entire stock of bananas with another boat, over 150
bananas for $3, a bag of 100 oranges for $3, a flat of tomatoes for $3, and
etc.
We
missed a group trip to a Costco-like store and another supermarket, where the
stores' owner provided a free bus for the cruisers and had to bring in an additional
truck to carry back all the purchases for the 30 - 40 people who went. I orchestrated a propane run, using a
truck-taxi to carry 9 bottles to a propane farm. All the cruisers chipped in for the taxi fare and left some of
their change behind, sufficient that my gas was free.
So, you
can purchase just about anything in Panama City. It just takes a little more travel to be successful.
The
main reason we had come to Panama City was to send our primary GPS back to The
States for repair and receive it back thru Pedro Miguel Boat Club, a cruiser-friendly
marina inside The Canal, just past the Mira Flores locks. Actually, we ended up using the Panamanian
mail system to send it to the U.S. and Pedro Miguel's forwarder in Miami to get
it back. Believe it or not, the
roundtrip shipment took just 2 weeks, repair included, over the Martin Luther
King holiday. The day after receiving
our GPS and confirming that it was functioning just as good as new, we did our
last provisioning and last emailing in preparation for our 600-plus-mile voyage. Once we knew we were going to be ready to
depart, we had a neighboring cruiser radio to the sailboat we wanted to buddy-boat
with, Poet's Place anchored in the Perlas islands, that we would depart Sunday
morning.
Although
I wanted to raise the sails immediately after raising the anchor, on Sunday
morning, Nancy motored for over a 1/2 hour while I cleaned off the sticky, clay-like
mud that stuck to the anchor. Even
dragging it in the water washed none of it off. I had to do it with a brush, and then I had to dig the mud out of
it before I could use it again. But
finally we raised the sails and worked our way through the many anchored cargo
ships, all of them waiting to pass through The Canal or offload in Balboa.
For the
first 9 hours, Nanjo averaged just under 4 knots of boat speed with the aid of
the current. We knew that Poet's Place
was enjoying better winds, since they departed from the Perlas islands where
the wind was not impeded by the costal mountains affecting us. However, by 1600 we cleared the coastal
mountains and the wind speed climbed steadily.
Our speed climbed impressively.
But as the wind speed increased, so did the sea state. Soon 6 - 8 foot swells were adding to our
speed as well as the effort to steer.
The wind and seas were directly behind us, as was the current; we were
on a "dead downwind" run. We
furled up the jib and only sailed with our main sail, "prevented"
with our boom vang. Nanjo's speed over-the-ground
was between 9 and 10 knots.
Soon
Nancy looked over at me and accused me of having a "doggie
face". "Excuse me. What are you talking about," I
responded. She smiled and pointed out,
"You know, like the doggies sitting in the back of a pickup, looking
around the edge of the cab with their tongues hanging out, with a big smile on
their face. That is you at this
moment." . . . My pleasure for the sailing conditions was obviously
showing and I tried not to drool.
At
1915, Poet's Place reported their position on a special SSB frequency to
several cruisers in Panama City (which
they knew Nanjo would hear also). They had
been flying ever since leaving the Perlas and were over 40 miles ahead of us
and were already rounding Punta Mala.
They expected us to catch them, but we never expected that they would
get that far out front. Since they were
sailing at 6.5 - 7 knots, we knew that we had to keep Nanjo well above that
speed to even begin to reduce the gap.
Since
Steve (steering vane) isn't able to handle steering when Nanjo is surfing,
Nancy and I had to manually steer. This
is work! The slightest loss of concentration
or hesitation in a turn of the rudder caused Nanjo to slew 30-60° off
course. Nancy and I both stayed up
until we got around Punta Mala. You see,
besides the wind and seas, we had to be vigilant of freighters. Punta Mala is like a funnel for all shipping
arriving or departing the Pacific side of the Panama Canal. We had set our waypoint 20 miles off Punta
Mala to reduce if not eliminate this hazard. However, just an hour before arriving at the waypoint, a freighter
rounding the point didn't take the usual route toward Balboa and headed in our
direction. Nancy went below and radioed
the freighter. It was good that she
did, because he admitted that he didn't know we were there until he looked a
little more closely at his radar after her call. He asked what we wanted him to do. Since I could see by his lights that he would pass safely,
although within 200 yards of Nanjo, we told him not to change course or speed until
past us on our port side.
As we
rounded Punta Mala at 2330, we changed course toward the next waypoint (a point
far enough to the west that the ocean currents wouldn't force us into the
Columbian coast, making us tack and loose time and distance). Now Nanjo wasn't dead downwind, but on a broad
reach. We decided to furl out the jib
to a "reefed" size about 20% of its full size, and double-reef the
main. First we did the jib, but when we
went to reef the main, the sail slides jammed in the track and I couldn't reef
it OR raise it back to its original height.
This made the main much too full and caused Nanjo to be even more
difficult to handle. But we could do
nothing else until I went up the mast to fix the problem, and that wasn't going
to be at night and in these sea conditions.
Nancy
and I were spelling each other every 30 minutes to keep our muscles from
getting strained. I already was nursing
a sprained wrist and a cramped thigh. In
addition, neither Nancy or I had slept but we knew we had to. So at around 0200, we began dozing while we weren't
at the helm. This was the first time
that Nancy had handled these difficult conditions. In the past, since they lasted for just a few hours, I would do
all the steering in these challenging conditions. In the beginning, frequently she couldn't keep Nanjo from veering
severely. But soon she was able to stay
within 10°. Just for reference, the
conditions reminded me of rounding Point Conception in California. During the early morning hours the wind gauge
indicated that the wind got as high as 35 knots. Our GPS showed our boat speed as high as 15 knots when we
surfed!
As the
sky lightened and the sun rose, the wind and seas settled down. Nancy was getting so skilled at steering in
the quartering swells, that she could keep Nanjo straight and true. At 0700, our position proved that we had
traveled 170 miles in 24 hours, farther than we have ever traveled in a day. We averaged 7 knots of boat speed, and since
we were under 4 knots for the first 9 hours, that meant we averaged 9 knots for the next 15
hours. At 0800, Poet's Place checked in
and gave their position as 6 miles north of us, but parallel. We had caught them in 13 hours.
The
winds slacked off but were still sufficient to give us good speed. One day, in a rainstorm, we were becalmed
for an hour. Otherwise, we made good
speed until the last night.
During
our travels with Poet's Place, we determined that their VHF radio wasn't able
to transmit farther than 4 or 5 miles, while ours was good at 4 to 5 times that. So we would hail them on our VHF and tell
them to come up on SSB. They would talk
on SSB and we would respond on VHF.
While it was easier to talk to them if we stayed close, Nanjo would soon
speed out of range with Steve steering.
One
morning, after hearing their position and determining that they were about 15
miles behind us, we had a decision to make.
If we kept going, and maintained the same speed, we could make Bahia de Caraquez,
Ecuador in the afternoon. However, that
would mean leaving Poet's Place by herself through the day and evening. We decided that buddy boating meant that you
stay together until the end, so we turned around and headed back to meet up
with them.
During
the hour that followed, we passed a fishing net, pangas and a large fishing
boat (probably a "mother ship").
This was about 200 miles off the coast of Columbia, but near the Ecuadorian
border. As a gentle rain lowered
visibility to just a mile or so, I was concerned that we might not see Poet's
Place and sail by them. So I radioed
them on VHF. The skipper responded and
stated that a panga with five men in it was along side Poet's Place,
aggressively demanding food, cigarettes and fuel. Just as I was talking to him, one of the men tried to board
Poet's Place. However, the panga's
outboard got tangled in Poet's Place's towed fishing line jamming their
propeller and stalling the motor. That
terminated the confrontation and the boarding.
Poet's Place disappeared into the mist and we came within view about 15
minutes later. We stayed within
eyesight of each other during the rest of the voyage.
The day
we crossed the Equator, the sun shone brightly and the wind was gentle. As we approached the transition from
northern to southern hemispheres, from being a lowly polliwog to becoming an
honorable shellback, the two boats sailed close to each other and took digital
photos to record the event.
That
night the wind dropped and the rain began.
We encountered frequent shipping traffic and fishing boats, so we
finally decided to use our engines. We arrived
offshore Bahia de Caraquez about 0730 Saturday morning, exactly 6 days after
departing Balboa, 690 miles at an average speed of 5 knots.
Before
we could get below to take naps, several pangas came along side and conversed
with Nancy. First, they asked for some
drinking water. Since we had collected a
lot of rain that was no problem. They
gave Nancy a small lobster as a gift for her kindness. Then they wanted to trade some shrimp. First Nancy joked about giving them some
more water and held a bucket up to the sky beckoning for more rain. Everyone was laughing and having a good
time. Then she brought out two baseball
caps for them to choose between. Next she
tried to get 6 tiger prawns and 6 medium shrimp for the hat. She dickered for a few minutes, but El Jefe
only wanted to give her 4 tigers. She
adjusted the cap's band to fit his head size, stood back and said,
"Guapo!", which means handsome.
Everyone laughed and just before the boat pulled away, El Jefe tossed
two more tiger prawns into the cockpit.
She had made friends.
The Port
Captain would not let us enter without using a pilot, so near high tide, just
after sunset, the pilot and two naval officers boarded Nanjo to take us in. Nanjo was selected because we had a wheel
and Poet's Place had a tiller. I have
to admit, I would have never attempted to take us in where the pilot chose. We were told to anchor near three other cruising
boats, just off the sea wall in front of the Port Captain's office, in about
15' of water at high tide. Shallow but
secure. We gave the pilot, officers and
their panga driver little gifts of chocolate.
(They have gone out of their way to help us ever since.)
It was
after 8pm when we relaxed and enjoyed bar-b-q lobster and shrimp for our first
dinner in Ecuador; a wonderful beginning to an anticipated stay of 6 months or
more.
Crew of
Nanjo