It's Ricky Martin!! (Panama City)

After a nice evening on one of our new friend’s boat (Mai Tai), our upcoming plans have possibly altered somewhat.

Ollie - a generous, friendly and one legged English host, suggested we could buddy boat together down to the Marquesas. This would add a level of safety to the trip which a single boat alone could not hope to achieve.

So having made that decision over a couple of cold drinks last night, this morning - still thinking it a great idea - we upped anchor and headed the 30nms back to Panama City for final provisioning and to check out. The plan from there being to re-rendezvous with Ollie and his crew back in the Pearl islands this coming weekend ( 4 days away as I write this).

The journey back to Panama City was noteworthy for a few natural reasons. There’s a marked contrast between the seemingly barren Mediterranean Sea where we began our adventures 5 years ago and the absolute abundance of sea life that surrounds us here in the Pacific.

The calm water as we slowly travelled along was alive with a variety of small grey/brown jellyfish. Even in the bright daylight some of them emitted a bright neon blue light visible at least a meter down.

We saw, on two occasions through the day, our first sharks - possibly hammerheads from the fin shape, moving very sedately around in small groups. There’s nothing overly threatening about the movement, but the mere sight of them and the associated connotations of seeing a fin cutting through the water was enough to send a shudder down the spine.

Some way off we saw dolphins, repeatedly jumping very high in the air and coming down with an almighty splash - looked like they were having great fun.

Chez also saw a stingray gracefully jump from the water - it’s entire body used almost like a bird’s wings before it too returned to the deep.

Add to all that - a missed fish who made my rod squeal and my heart race for a minute or two, and some whales blowing a long way off, it was quite an interesting day on the water.

Arrived into our selected anchorage back at Panama City late afternoon, dropped the anchor in the murk below us. Being a little unsure of the depth - as the gauge has been giving us mixed readings - I dropped a lead to check how much water was below us - our recent hard grounding still sitting in the forefront of our minds. There’s large 5m tides to be considered on this side of the Panama Canal too - something we’ve barely had to worry about before. The good news, we anchored in a depth of 9m - more than enough for the tide to take us down and back up again without issue. Both very tired from the longish day, we had an early night.

Not sure how many times I’ve used the cliched sailors saying ‘sailing plans are written in wet sand at low tide’ but oh does that apply today!

We headed over to rendezvous with Erick, our immigration agent this morning, to check out, leave the country and head out with Ollie and crew. Sitting in the lobby of the Duty Free centre, with cruise liner passengers milling around us, we get a text from Ollie. He now plans to leave the Pearl Islands tomorrow, and asked if we could make it back to there in time. Well… we could, but do we want to? - there followed an hour of absolute turmoil: our reason for leaving was to have the added safety of a buddy boat, but leaving sooner than we’d planned in less than favourable conditions is something we eventually decided was unwise. To rush and stick to someone else’s timetable courts disaster. The upshot of all that is that we didn’t check out - Ollie will head off as planned (we assume) and we’ll take a breath, wait for a weather window that suits us and one that we believe is best for our desired route. We’re not in a hurry, and having had today to now consider things a little more, we are both really happy with our decision.

After returning to the boat for a coffee, we ventured out again to begin (slowly) ticking off the list of things we do need to do before we leave - regardless of when that may be. We hailed one of the prolific small yellow taxis and met our driver / host for the afternoon: Edgardo. He’s a chubby, happy, helpful guy with a fair smattering of English language up his sleeve. We’ve got three stops planned:

First is to a chart shop to pick up a proper physical copy of a nautical chart of the pacific. Edgardo takes us there through the outskirts of Panama City, reminiscent of Canberra with well spaced large municipal buildings and lots of roundabouts. It’s significantly more jungly than Canberra though.

Arrived at the chart shop, Edgardo comes in with us to translate and have a look around. It’s a wonderful walk back in time, resembling an office from the 50s; wooden desks, rubber stamps, and a true gentlemen who listens to our requests, and scurries off to dig out the appropriate map reference books. Once we confirmed what we wanted he then uses a massive state of the art HP colour printer to produce a large, perfectly detailed Nautical chart. As we leave, I type into Google translate: ‘it was a true pleasure to meet you’ (fue un verdadero placer conocerte) to which he smiles and extends a hand to shake - a rare occurrence in post Covid days. Next stop with Edgardo is a supposedly well stocked chandlers - it wasn’t at all well stocked, and was slap bang in the bad part of town. The visit did however throw up a nice comedic moment - one of the shop keepers asked my name:

“It’s Richard, soy Richardo, Richy, you know… like Ricky Martin”

This was received with much laughter.

From then on I was Reeeeky Martin for the rest of the day.

On to the supermarket from there, for a fresh food top up. I paid Edgardo the agreed $20 and said he could go, as we didn’t know how long we’d be… he wouldn’t hear of it. He came in to the supermercado and proceeded to do the shopping with us, pointing out the bargains, weighing our fruit and veg and generally being a fun guy to be around. He then took us the 20min drive back to the marina, helped us unload the shopping and didn’t press for more money - I took his number and will use his services again while we are here - nice to have a useful local friend to help out in a new location.

Today saw me back in my familiar hole: under the transom fiddling with the autopilot. I devised a work around that will effectively fix it until we can get somewhere suitable (probably Australia) to replace the faulty hardware. This was another job that went well - the fix worked, and will relieve us from the shoulder aching chore of hours at the helm - something that’s probably nice for a few hours on a lake on a Sunday, but definitely not for 40 days and nights on an open ocean crossing!