July 2009

I celebrated Canada Day by installing my new rudder stop. Apart from the hole that I thought wasn’t necessary proving to indeed be necessary, the operation went off without a hitch. Windsong was back in working order once more. A bit of excitement was created later in the day when a water taxi ran over a guy in his cayuco (dugout canoe). The cayuco was crushed, but the owner was unharmed, so the water taxi just left him there in the water! A cruiser had to go rescue the poor guy with his dinghy. The Canada Day celebrations were finished with Tai curry and cake aboard Tregoning.

The next day Sea Star, Tregoning, Navy Blue, and Windsong sailed for the Dark Land. OK, there is no wind in Panama, so we really steamed for the Dark Land. We steamed a carefully maintained diamond pattern behind Admiral Dan aboard Sea Star as we passed Isla Christobal.

The town of Bocas del Toro is located on Isla Colon. We were now passing Isla Chrostobal. Colon, Christobal? Christobal de Colon? Don’t I know that guy? Yes, in English we call him Christopher Columbus! Ol’ Columbo arrived here in 1502 on his fourth and final voyage to the New World. The Dark Land is one of the many places in the Bocas del Toro region that still look the way Columbus found them.

As we began to wind our way through the mangroves into Palos Lagoon, we were greeted by dozens of native Ngobe Bugle school children paddling home from school in their cayucos. What a sight! Children as young as five years old, in perfectly cleaned and pressed school uniforms, expertly handling the same vessels their ancestors used to greet Columbus. Once we had anchored a young teenage boy named Louis paddled from boat to boat asking for school supplies, books, and clothes. Each boat gave him a t-shirt and a book. We had an interesting time trying to communicate using my Spanish-English dictionary. At one point he asked me if he could have Spot. "No, no, mi gato!" (No, no, my cat!)

We hopped in the dinghies looking for the path we had read about in the cruising guides. A Ngobe Bugle man in his cayuco showed us the hidden opening in the mangroves that led to the creek that ended at the path. Once we knew where to go, we discovered that Dan and Kathy had disappeared. We found them talking to Valentino in his launcha, a type of super cayuco with an outboard. Valentino was the owner of most of the land surrounding the lagoon. His ancestors were brought to Panama City as slaves, escaped, and fled here.

After meeting Valentino, we headed up the trail. It was steep, muddy, and filled with the most amazing jungle sounds. We saw many columns of leaf cutter ants and several colourful frogs. Mike Fay used sport sandals as his footwear of choice when he did his Megatransect walk across Africa at the equator. He claimed that boots were useless in the jungle because you can’t keep them dry and your feet will start to rot. I took his advice and went for the hike in my Keene sandals. I quickly found two flaws in Mike’s logic. One is that once you step in the nice greasy mud, your feet slide around inside the sandals as if they were filled with real grease. The other was the leaf cutter ants. I was the first to reach the top of the hill. There I found a fork in the path. While trying to decide which fork to take, I forgot to look down and stepped right into a column of ants. ATTAAAAACCKKK!!! The invasion was on! Alison arrived at the top of the hill just in time to see me doing my ant dance. I hopped on one foot swatting the ants off of the other foot, until they invaded the foot that was still on the ground. This procedure was then repeated hopping on the other foot, until that foot was re-invaded. When I finally found some ground clear of ants, and freed my feet of the invading hordes, every square inch of my feet was throbbing with ant venom.

After our hike, we crossed the lagoon for a tour of Valentino’s pasture. He showed us his cows, bulls, limes, and oranges. Then he told us that the leaf cutter ants were about the most tame thing I could have run into. There are five species of venomous snakes in the area: two species of coral snakes, bush masters, fer de lance, and another with a local name that I had never heard. He carefully learned the folk cures for their bites from his grandfather because we knew that you will never get to a hospital in time.

When we returned to our boats we had one more set of visitors. Two Ngobe Bugle women came by in a cayuco with their toddlers and sold us each a bag of bananas and limes. One of the toddlers handled all of the money! The bananas were short, fat, and straight, nothing like the Cavendish bananas found in your local supermarket. They were incredibly tasty for the two days that they were ripe before they spoiled. In fact, there are over 1000 varieties of bananas. The Cavendish was chosen for the banana of export due to the combination of very productive trees, and bananas that ripen slowly enough to make it to market on the other side of the word.

In the morning we returned to Valentino’s pasture to see the morning birds. He advised us to land at his brother-in-law’s since the tide was so low. His brother-in-law had cocoa beans and nutmeg drying on the dock and breakfast cooking over a wood fire built in a fire box on a table outside. There was a nearly finished cayuco surrounded by shavings. They carve them by hand with hand saws, planes, and axes.

While the rest of the fleet returned to Bocas, Navy Blue and Windsong continued on to Almirante for some inexpensive supplies. Bocas is a tourist town and, being on an island, everything must be shipped in. This inflates the grocery prices pretty significantly and made trip to Almirante quite worthwhile. The first thing you notice approaching Almirante are the huge containerships loading containers of bananas. In the 1900's, America’s United Fruit Company began growing bananas on Isla Colon. The crop was wiped out by disease forcing the relocation of the banana plantations to the mainland creating the main industry for the towns of Changuinola and Almirante.

The following day we had a beautiful sail back to Bocas, laden with supplies. It was such a lovely sail that I sailed right into the anchorage. I furled the genny at the last moment and started the engine to get to the exact right spot and set the anchor. I put it in gear and... nothing. I tried reverse... nothing. I had a sickening feeling of deja vu. I dropped the anchor right there and went over the side. The shaft had sheared again in the exact same place, and another $1200 propeller was gone into Davy Jones locker.

The only logical time for the shaft to have sheared was when I started the engine, so the propeller should have been near my path into the anchorage. I plotted out three way points on my track and used my handheld GPS and the dinghy to anchor three fenders marking out my track through the anchorage. Randall, Alison, and I spent 5 hours in the water searching over the next three days and came up empty handed.

In the meantime, Dan and Kathy’s son Steve arrived. While I was snorkelling for my propeller, he was off taking surfing lessons. Steve decided he wanted to sail for Crawl Cay for some snorkelling then on to Bluefield lagoon and the Rio Cricamola to meet the Ngobe Bugle people. Dan and Kathy invited me to pack up a bag and move aboard with them for the trip. I decided instead to be a man and sail Windsong with no engine. I pulled the hook and sailed out of the anchorage with my genny. Soon I was reaching along at 4 knots with the DRS and main drawing nicely. Engines are for wimps! Near the end of the run to Crawl Cay, the wind filled in a little and I had to harden up to a close reach getting her all the way up to six knots.

The holding ground at Crawl Cay was not of the best. I dropped the hook on what I thought was a sandy mound 20 feet deep then hitched the dinghy to the back of the boat to set the anchor. The anchor dragged right off of the mound and finally held when I found myself in 50 feet of water. I let out all 200 feet of rode then dove on the anchor. With 20 feet of visibility it was a bit of a challenge. I found it in 30 feet of water. All that was holding me was the chain wrapped around some coral. At least that was something holding me!

The 20 foot visibility was hard to get used to after the 100 foot visibility on the reefs as we were crossing the Caribbean. Still, reef life was plentiful. We saw lots of sponge brittle stars that were wrapped around the sponges and corals. There were jellyfish with tiny little fish living in their tentacles, and bright coloured crabs like the yellow arrow crab. The visibility was pretty unnerving when Steve and I did some breath hold dives down to 40 feet. You couldn’t see the bottom until you were halfway down and when you reached the bottom, you couldn’t see the surface.

In the morning we departed for Laguna Bluefield, named for the Dutch pirate Blauvelt who once frequented the area. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Time to use the dinghy as a tug boat. I strapped it alongside, fired up the old Evinrude 8, and soon I was slipping through the water at four knots. About halfway there, a squall blew through providing enough wind to shut down the dinghy and finish the trip under sail. We anchored in 50 feet of water in a small bay next to the village of Punta Allegre. We were immediately surrounded by cayucos full of Ngobe Bugle children begging for school supplies.

I had already burned through about half of my supply of gasoline. The dinghy burns a whole lot more gas when you are using it to push your boat. It seemed pretty unlikely that I would make it back to Bocas del Toro without buying some more. The cruising guide indicated that the tienda (store) across the bay in the village of Bahia Azul sold gas. I loaded my cans into the dinghy and went to investigate. I quickly found the tienda and the proprietor directed me to his neighbour who had a shed full of gasoline jugs. She happily sold me four gallons at $7.50 a gallon. That must be a new record for the most I have ever paid for a gallon of gasoline! The gas was measured out by siphoning it into one gallon milk jugs. These were then poured into my cans by one of her sons using a recycled one pint oil jug as a funnel. The whole time, a group of mischievous children gathered on the dock watching with big smiles, and trying to climb into my dinghy every time the woman looked away.

When I got back to my boat at Punta Allegre, I was visited by a Peace Corps volunteer who was working with the natives. She asked what the children who had been visiting our boats had been asking for. She explained that the parents send them out to beg for school supplies every time they see a cruising boat. The Peace Corps has been trying to discourage this behaviour and instead promotes advertisement of what is available in the village tiendas. For example the tienda right here in Punta Allegre sells gasoline, so there was no need for me to go all the way across the bay.

Our next adventure was a trip to the head of the bay to walk across to the village of Ensenada de Punta Avispa. Dan, Stephen, and I took Sea Star’s dinghy to find the trail head. On the way, we stopped to ask directions. The man pointed out the dock at the trail head and said nothing about his net in the water until we wrapped the prop around it. Then he wanted $5 to repair his net. Given the condition of the net, we had to wonder if it served any function besides catching Gringos. We were greeted at the dock by another Peace Corps volunteer collecting a fee of $5 per person for use of the trail. The Peace Corps had assisted in the paving of the trail with concrete and proceeds were going toward the building of outhouses for the school and an aqueduct to bring clean water to the town. She warned us that a chief on the other side would try to collect another $5 from us for walking the beach, which is public land in Panama.

The path took us through rainforest and Ngobe Bugle banana plantations to Ensenada de Punta Avispa. Here the natives were raising chickens and cattle in the fields that surrounded their stilt homes. At this point school was let out. Every village we had been to had a school, but it seems that each school only offers certain grade levels because there were students everywhere walking from village to village. They wore beautiful sparkling clean, perfectly pressed uniforms and bare feet. Their nicely polished black leather shoes were carried in their backpacks so that they would stay clean. Three of them decided to act as our guides and took us down the trail to the village of Cusapin, the largest village in the area. Cusapin had a huge school that seemed to take up most of the village, a couple of tiendas, and a couple of restaurants. It was also located directly across the peninsula from where our boats were anchored. We asked three people for directions to the trail that would lead us back to Punta Allegre. Two of the three said that we would be much better off hiring a launcha to take us back by water. After a snack, a cool drink, and much deliberation we decided on the launcha.

The final stop of Stephen’s tour was Rio Cricamola. The journey there was the same story as the journey to Bluefield: no wind and the dinghy as a tug for the first half, and a nice sail for the second half. Tregoning had joined us on second night in Laguna Bluefield and now headed up the Rio Cricamola with us in our dinghies. We were anchored in Irish Bay, around the corner from the main outlet of the river, but at the head of the bay was a narrow, fast flowing distributary that provided a shortcut to the main river. At the junction with main river was a Ngobe Bugle homestead with thatched huts on stilts, beached cayucos, and pigs running wild. After a long leisurely ride up the river through the rainforest, we arrived at the village of Notolente. These Ngobe Bugle villagers rarely see Gringos, so most of the village came down to the large launcha they had beached in front of the village. The launcha acted as a pier for us land the dinghies alongside. We were surrounded by dozens of grinning faces eager to examine the wonders of our binoculars and digital cameras. They brought bags to sell to the ladies and when we inquired about bananas and plantains, an elderly woman climbed into a cayuco. A young boy jumped in behind her and paddled her off to cut us our fruit from the trees lining the river. She returned with a pile of limes, three stems of sugar cane, three hands of plantains, and an entire bunch of bananas. The bananas were the same shape as the grocery store Cavendish, but much smaller and much sweeter. They offered to sell us a pig to go along with our fruit, but we couldn’t see how a live pig could be carried in our dinghies. We also didn’t want to see the pig cease to be live. Once we were well laden with fruit, the whole village waved us goodbye. On the way back to the boats, the people living at the homestead by the distributary greeted us with another set of grinning faces and sold the ladies more bags.

Getting back to Bocas del Toro was quite an adventure. It started out, as usual, with pushing Windsong along with the dinghy in a dead calm in the morning. I had contemplated taking a slightly longer way around that would be a little more straight forward, but decided to follow Sea Star and Tregoning as they threaded their way through the Sumner Channel. As we approached the channel I was pretty much out of gas. I hailed Tregoning to slow down so that I could come alongside to get their spare jerry can of gasoline. When our two boats began to draw closer, there seemed to be a breakdown in our radio communications as Randall and Alison began dropping fenders on the wrong side of their boat. After a couple of attempts to hail them, I hatched a simpler plan. I jumped in the dinghy, untied it, and left Windsong to sail on with Spot in command. I was back with all of the fuel that I needed less than five minutes later. Spot spent her whole time as Acting Captain asleep in the starboard bookshelf.

Things continued to get interesting. Tregoning slammed on the breaks by throwing her engine in reverse when they found themselves threading their way between two shoals. I had devised a clever way to control the throttle on the dinghy. I tied a clove hitch around the throttle then tied the other end of the lanyard to the side of the dinghy. By pushing the tiller arm on the outboard away from Windsong with my deck brush, I could throttle up. By pushing the back of the outboard away from Windsong, I could throttle down. Even if I did try to shift the outboard into reverse with the deck brush, I can’t imagine it would bring the boat to a halt anytime in the near future. All I could do when Tregoning came to a dead stop 50 feet in front of me was to throttle back and swerve around them. This left me alongside them going dead slow. When I throttled up again, I fell victim to one of the problems with driving a boat with a propeller mounted alongside. A such a low speed the water flowing over the rudder was not enough to counter the turning moment created by the dinghy engine. I cranked the wheel over helplessly as the dinghy engine swung Windsong straight into a shoal. My only chance was to steer with the turn instead of fighting it, and somehow I managed to turn her 360 degrees before I reached the shoal.

As we passed through the Sumner Channel, the wind finally picked up, on the nose. Soon I did another 360 because the outboard couldn’t push Windsong into the wind fast enough to maintain steerage. It was time to raise the sails and start beating. The channel was so narrow that I had to sail every last inch on each tack if I was going to make any headway. It became a game of chicken with the depth sounder. As I approached the mangroves I would get the genny clear to tack, hold my fingers on the tack button on the autopilot, and watch for the bottom to start to rise on the depth sounder. As soon as I saw the depth plot soar upward, I would hit the tack button and start cranking the genny around. Thankfully, the channel soon widened and the tacks became less frequent. The wind never shifted or let up, so I had to beat my way all the way back to Bocas. Eventually, I was sailing along in the dark watching flashlights from cayucos poking up to warn me of their presence. When I finally arrived in Bocas, Randall and Alison guided me through the anchorage with their dinghy, then Dan and Kathy brought me a pizza for my grumbling stomach. I had sailed Windsong to Laguna Bluefield, Rio Cricamola, and back like a real man. A real sore, tired, and hungry man!

Steve flew home and we got down to a little bit of business. First I ordered myself a new shaft of the strongest damn steel I could find to be shipped to Shelter Bay marina at the Panama Canal. Then I solved the problem of having to buy water at $1.10 a gallon. I have a boom tent made from an old mainsail that stretches from my mast to my backstay providing much needed shade over half of the boat on hot tropical afternoons. I discovered that by flipping the outside edge up I could effectively create eaves troughs directing all of the water that lands on the boom tent into a pail on either side of the deck. In a good squall I could easily collect 10 gallons of water. It was like money pouring from the sky!

It was now time for an inland adventure. My 36^th birthday was coming up, and it happened to also be the 40^th anniversary of the first moon landing. I decided that I wanted to spend my 36^th birthday as close to the moon as I could get, at the summit of Vulcan Baru, the tallest peak in Panama.

The crews of Windsong, Sea Star, and Tregoning caught a water taxi from Bocas del Toro to Almirante. It was a whole different ride at 30 knots. From there we grabbed a taxi to Changinola where we had to apply for our Marinara Visas. We were advised to arrive first thing in the morning so that we would not have to wait long in line. This theory almost worked. The young ladies manning the immigration office immediately took copies of every piece of paper work that we had for ourselves and our boats, as well as photographs, and questioned each of us in a separate room while filling out paperwork. When this was all completed, we were informed that the only person authorized to issued our visas would not be in for a couple more hours. We went off for a late breakfast and returned. The authorized issuer of visas had arrived, and so had the crowd. We waited in line for another hour before being interviewed again by the woman who was to issue our visas. Once again, we had to provide copies of every piece of documentation imaginable along with photographs, and answer all of the same questions while even more forms were completed. When all was said and done, the entire morning had passed, a nice thick stack of forms had been placed in a labelled folder for each boat, each of us was issued a Marinara Visa with our photograph, and Windsong had been renamed the motor nave Wing Sing. It seemed best to make no comment.

Now that we were all legal, we piled into the bus that was to take us over the mountains to the big city of David (Dah-VEED). It was another lesson on vehicle passenger capacity. I found myself crammed over the wheel well with a young mother and her two daughters. The girls were so fascinated by how furry the Gringo was that they kept grabbing my arm hair and beard. When we stopped for a lunch break at the halfway point, I graciously offered to switch seats with the woman’s husband. Chivalrous perhaps, but it didn’t get me a more comfortable seat. The woman the husband had been sitting next to was so wide of hip that I could only get half of my butt onto the seat. David was a welcome site!

In the morning we boarded a painted over school bus for the 45 minute ride up the mountains to Boquete (Boh-ket-AY). Since this bus was designed to seat full sized adults, it sat only three across, two on one side of the aisle, one on the other. Apparently, I still had not grasped the concept of passenger capacity. In Panama in addition to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, they also celebrate Children’s Day. Today was the day, and the local festivities were happening in Boquete. The bus stopped at every corner to pick up mothers and their children, stretching the 45 minute ride to an hour and 45 minutes. By the time we reached Boquete we were seated five across, three on one side of the aisle, two on the other.

We reached Boquete just in time to register for our zip line adventure. We immediately found Habla Ya, the Spanish school through whom I had arranged zip lining and the Vulcan Baru hike for Alison and I. The others were content with birdwatching. We signed away our lives, paid our bucks, were loaded into a cage on the back of a pickup, and hauled up the mountain safari style to the zip line operation. On arrival, we were strapped into sit harnesses and chest harnesses, and fitted with helmets and welding gloves with an extra thick leather palm for squeezing the wire to slow down. Then we were given a lesson on the correct position for riding the zip lines, how to break, and how the guides would signal us to brake or speed up. The pickup hauled us the rest of the way to the start of the zip line network, then we walked down the trail to the first platform. In addition to the harness we each had a Y-shaped tether. We clipped into a wire around the tree and waited while the guides clipped onto the line a road down to their stations on the various trees. When our turn came, we were clipped into the guide, who then slung our pulley over the line and clipped us to it by the harness and both ends of the tether. He then gave us a liability inspired description of how to break on this particular wire. If the instructions were followed to the letter, you would get stuck halfway down the wire and have to pull yourself to the next tree. At the far end of the wire was another guide who continually signalled you to go faster. So began our enlightening eco-tour of the rainforest canopy. Yah right! It was an adrenaline filled roller coaster ride in which the trees were seen only as a blur.

Buzzing with endorphin, Alison and I rejoined the group and proceeded up to Finca Lerida, the hotel Dan had chosen as the best birdwatching place in Panama. It also happened to be a real working award winning coffee plantation.

Alison and I awoke at 05:00 to start our hike up Vulcan Baru. I felt like hell and my head was throbbing. I didn’t think much of it. I always feel that way at 5am! Our guide Victor arrived along with his son Victor, the taxi, and my rented pack. The plan was to hike up today, camp near the summit, watch the sunrise from the summit on my birthday, then hike down. The cab took us straight to the mountain, not pausing for breakfast or coffee. There was little point. No sane person is awake at 5am so nothing was opened. It was still dark when we reached the base of the volcano. We piled out of the cab and I started to go through the contents of my rental pack to make sure that I was not carrying anything extra. As I was doing this Victor sent the cab away that was supposed to bring any extra gear back to the Spanish school. He did not seem to understand my distress. I soon learned why. He was Superman and could carry absolutely anything up the mountain. He just piled the extra gear on top of his pack and started marching up the road to the summit. In fact, he brought so much gear that he had brought his son along to carry the rest.

I am not Superman and getting up at 5am and having no breakfast and no coffee is not the way to prepare me to climb a mountain. I tried to communicate this problem to Victor. After an hour he stopped and served us tomato sandwiches and Nescafe instant cappuccino. I was not impressed. Boquete grows some of the finest coffee in the word. Up here Nescafe is known as No Es Café! Still, at that point I would have taken my caffeine in a syringe! This revived me quite a bit, but I still felt incredibly weak and tired. As we continued our journey upward, rather than waking up, I became increasingly feeble and fatigued. Soon Victor Senior and Alison charged ahead while Victor Junior stayed behind with wimpy old me. I found myself needing to stop to rest more and more frequently. I could not figure out what was happening to me. When we reached Curva Raton just over halfway in our 14km hike to the summit, I couldn’t go any further. I was exhausted, chilled, and frail as a kitten. I pulled out my camp mattress and sleeping bag and laid down hoping to regain enough strength the continue. It was to no avail. Victor Junior used his cell phone to radio ahead to Victor Senior that the Gringo was malo. Victor Senior and Alison dropped their packs and sprinted for the summit while I rested. When they returned they pumped me full of food, water, and ibuprofen. Victor Senior diagnosed me with mountain sickness. This didn’t make sense to me because I had gone higher straight from sea level before. Then he observed my fever and changed his diagnoses to Dengue Fever. I hoped that one wasn’t any more likely. Then he took my entire pack on top of his and I staggered back down the mountain.

I fell asleep the instant my head hit the pillow and shivered and sweated my way through the night. Alison and Randall revived me at noon on my birthday with a cup of Finca Lerida’s award winning coffee. Dan and Kathy had rented a car and they took me down through a wild river valley and past a rock wall that looked with a miniature version of the Devil’s Causeway turned sideways. When we stopped at the airport in David we got a phone call from Susan who was watching our boats and cats back in Bocas. Sea Star had been struck by lightning. What a marvellous birthday!

My consolation prize was watching the moon landing 40^th anniversary coverage on cable in the hotel in David. An interesting note: As the LEM approached the landing it started giving computer errors. No one knew what to do except a young 28 year old computer genius named Jack Garmin. He had gone through every error situation the computer could generate and had devised a solution for each one. Is that THE Garmin of Garmin electronics? No. I looked it up later on the internet. His named turned out to be Garman. Garmin was founded by two guys named Gary and Min. The computer was actually made by Raytheon.

When we got back to Bocas, the situation aboard Sea Star was pretty grim. Basically, if it had a microchip in it, it was fried. The refrigeration, bow thruster, instruments, autopilot, stereo, and SSB were all dead. Dan and I diagnosed everything we could, then Dan sent an estimate to their insurance company and started ordering replacement parts.

It took me a few more days to fully recover from my illness. When Alison decided that I was truly recuperated, she invited us all over to Tregoning for dinner a made me a delicious chocolate birthday cake.

Bocas had given Sea Star quite a wallop, and already given Windsong quite a beating by snapping her propeller shaft, but it wasn’t done. There is very little sun and very little wind in Panama, so despite my wind generator and solar panels, I was relying heavily on my alternator for power generation. On the morning of July 26, the diesel was happily purring away charging my batteries when suddenly the pitch increased. I glanced at the panel and notice that there was no tachometer display. The tachometer is driven by the alternator, so I quickly opened the port cockpit locker to look at the alternator display. I found a blank display and smoke! I instantly stopped the engine and started trouble shooting. A fuse was blown in the regulator harness. I replaced it and the alternator display came back to life. But, when I cranked the engine there was no response. Either the starter solenoid had fried, or the whole starter had given up the ghost. It was time to call the mechanic. It took Jeff longer to climb into the cupboard from which you can view the starter than to diagnose the problem.

"Boy, Your starter is deep fried! The strap connecting it to the solenoid is entirely burned away!"

How did I miss that? The bad news is that you cannot get a starter rebuilt in Panama. The good news is that my Universal Diesel is based on a common Kubota tractor engine that is plowing many a Panamanian field. Jeff gave me the name of an autoparts store in Changuinola. I went over to Navy Blue and got Valma, who was born in Spain, to make the call for me. She warned me that although she speaks Spanish, she doesn’t speak autoparts. We tried three different places with no luck. Finally I looked up the Kubota dealer in Panama City. He could get me the part, but it would take a week to ship it in from the States. It seemed like the best way to go. The only other option was to get it shipped directly from a marine supplier in the States to me.

Sea Star’s first shipment of parts arrived. I was sent up the mast to replace the fried masthead light and VHF antenna. Dan replaced the antenna tuner which got his SSB working again, and installed a new Link 20 battery monitoring system. It felt good to get some things fixed. Our boats were still pretty crippled. Both of us had been reduced to using ice for refrigeration. Sea Star’s refrigeration had its brains blown out by the lightning strike, and Windsong couldn’t generate enough electricity for refrigeration from sun and wind alone in calm cloudy Bocas. We were starting to wonder if Bocas was the Hotel California: You can check out, but you can never leave!