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ABOVE: Andres DeLeon and the crews of "Sand Dollar", "Queen Mary", and "Mesqua Ukee" on the Aboudi River near Ustupu, Kuna Yala. BELOW: Gringo Joe and the crews of "Street Legal" "Sand Dollar", "Simba", and "Ithaka" during a rainstorm at Isla Grande in June 2002
BELOW: a Spanish fort ruin guarding the entrance to the harbor at Porto Bello. The picture is from fortifications on the north side of the harbor.
ABOVE: Miraflores locks and towers of the
Bridge of the Americas in the background
BELOW: Kuna Revolution celebration in Ailigandi -
stacking up "dead" Panamanian soldiers
We were travelling at this time with Douglas and Bernadette of "Ithaka" and Frank and Linda of "Simba". All of us were receiving our daily visits from the diligent Kuna indian ladies out to sell their molas (Kuna indian fabric art). Every afternoon, Cade snorkeled the reefs chasing fish - though the reefs of the San Blas had manyy small sharks about! Several times, spearfishing trips were cut short by the arrival of small shark packs curious to see the gringos' daily catch.
Our idyll was about to end: about mid-June, we received an email proposing a job for Cade in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Although it was hard to tear Cade away from the daily grouper and snapper hunting - we had already recognized that with the stock market spiraling downward, a stint of work was in store for us. We wrapped up our exploration of the Holandes Cays, laid in a store of Molas and sailed a day to the west to the check-in port for Panama at Porvenir.
At this point, we made the dreaded discovery that we had left our passports and boat papers in San Andres!! With a few fortunate email contacts and a couple of satellite telephone calls here and there, courtesy of our great friends on "Ithaka", we were soon able to arrange for the retrieval of the missing documents. We hastened out of Porvenir without checking in with any authorities and sailed west along the coast to Isla Grande, where we thought we might be able to find a mailing address of some sort to receive our missing documents.
That address
turned out to be the city address of
Gringo Joe and
Cecilia, who had a great weekend house on
Isla Grande, about
10 miles north of Porto
Bello. We were very fortunate to meet these
kind
and friendly people who also opened their home for a little cruisers
party
one afternoon.
After
a few days in Isla Grande, with some last
minute provisions
purchased, the diesel fuel as full as we could carry, the water tanks
full
of the daily deluge of northern Panama rain, and our paperwork back
aboard,
it was time to say good
by to our cruising friends of the western Caribbean,
and set out on our own along the ill-rumored and adverse Colombian
mainland
coast to Venezuela - school was
starting in only about six weeks!
We had a fantastic visit in these villages - joining a happy synergy of cruisers and villagers preparing to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Kuna Revolution. The crews of "Queen Mary" - Brenda and Gene and their guests Delores and Bruce, "mesqua Ukee", and "Sand Dollar" participated in village life to a high degree. It was lots of fun.
We gradually moved up the Panamanian coast visiting other villages - sometimes warmly greeted but never to match Ustupu. We met the owner of a fledgling resort at Mamitupu, watched the community of Ailigandi celebrate their sometimes violent independence efforts of 80 years ago, and made a new friend of a fisherman at Playon Chico. We saw many beautiful islands and lovely reefs. As we moved into the more numerous islands farther west, we began to find abundant fish on the reefs and start a regular fish diet again.
Finally in March, we caught up with numerous other cruisers who had concentrated in the western portion of the San Blas. We saw many anchorages with ten or more sailboats, spent a couple of days in the bustle of the swimming pool again, and moved on west to Portobelo and then Colon where we helped friends on "Fifth Season" transit the Panama Canal.
After some reprovisioning and purchase of some needed boat equipment (including supposedly new batteries from Marine Warehouse that turned out to be BAD - and they would not warrant them! Beware of doing business with these CROOKS!), we returned to the San Blas - Lisa took a couple of unexpected trips to Kentucky, and Cade had a pleasant visit with some friends from Florida. In July, we returned to Cartagena for another holiday season.