Laundry day

The trip to the laundry is about a 10 minute dinghy ride to the nearest waterfall. The soap, the oxy clean, the bleach, the smelly softener and the brush are all in the buckets, the clothes are loaded, the kids are in! We proceeded to our destination. I debated on whether to through all the clothes into the puddles or into the buckets full of water for soaking. I need to look as if I know what I am doing, but the truth is I have no idea; will the clothes end up cleaner than before? I don’t know, but for sure they will smell better. These are my suggested steps:

1. Put water in the buckets
2. Put the color clothes in one and the whites in the other
3. Pour detergent
4. Let it soak
5. Grab, pull up and push down a few times
6. Turn load clockwise and counterclockwise a few times until you decide what the next step should be…
7. mmm…think like a washing machine!
8. Change the water
9. Toss the pieces high up in the waterfall so as they slide down the get and extra scrub
10. Toss it up again, catch them at the bottom.
11. Soak them a little longer
12. Add the Softener (my favorite part)
13. Let it soak into the fabric for a while
14. In the mean time lien against the rocks and let the waterfall massages you.
15. Sit on rock and apply the happy watermelon face shampoo on your hair (no need to say that is the girl’s shampoo). Close eyes, put head back and let the water flow down your hair a couple of times, then apply the extra volume, deep moisturizer Pantene conditioner and repeat the rinsing process… remember the clothes!
16. Squeeze water out of the clothes, put in buckets, put on dinghy, head back to boat and hang on the bow with the stains facing inward or otherwise, others may judge you ability to live in the wilderness!

The cutest part of our laundry day was Samantha doing the Barbie dolls clothing, She scrub, tossed, squeezed, soaked and hanged those 1 or 2 inches pieces of pants, dresses, skirts and swimsuits. I guess it’s a start!

The children

The girls have had several forms of interaction with Domingo’s grand kids; Melanie and Daisy, playing soccer, watching movies, sharing cookies, playing Barbie dolls, Polly Pockets, dancing or just looking at each other and giggling. They have also interacted with the children in the towns of Salmonete and Bahia Honda. Many children, I mean many. The island has 800 people of which 200 are kids.

There have been many times where the local kids stared at Samantha and Trinidad as they recognized them as being foreigners and so different, but nothing like in the towns in here. There is a small feeling of celebrity when the kids come running to the dock to receive us and then they follow us every where we go. It is a feeling that increases my confidence to interact with them, but it becomes totally overwhelming to the girls. Typically, they want to get close and touch the girls’s hair, they are curious, they want to hear how they talk, and they want to make friends. The case was a little different in Salmonete, another town up the river, where the children gathered by the slide to watch every step Samantha and Trini took. They kept their distance. I didn’t want Samantha and Trinidad to feel intimidated and it was working well, Trini was even making the kids laugh. It was great until she tripped and fell. The laughs became evil in Trini’s perception, but the kids realized her sadness as the crying reached the higher decibels and they stopped. At that point I quit trying to blend in.

Domingo Gonzalez and family

Upon our arrival we were received by the man of the guidebooks; Domingo. He introduces himself as the man who provides the fruits and vegetables to the boats. He points out that the anchorage is safe and that right in front of his house is the spot or anywhere in front of his property. He owns a large portion of what we can see in this bay. It used to be a popular anchorage some years back, 15 to 20 boats would be sharing this jewel of a place, but now, he wonders “what is happening to the boats they are not coming as much as they used to? It’s starting to get lonely” , He enjoys the cruisers company and makes a portion of his living selling produce and trading. He has made very good friends through out the years. He remembers most of them quite well, what they liked, what they bought and how long they stayed. We must make a good impression so our cruiser friends who will make it this way in the future hear no gossip about us.

In his 70’s Domingo still climbs the coconut palm to retrieve some coconuts for us and uses his machete to get stocks of bananas to satisfy our cravings. His day starts at 4:30 AM with a shovel and a rake in the field of the spinach, bell peppers or cucumbers. If he needs supplies or to make a phone call, he gets into his dugout canoe and rows with his one oar to town; an island 15 min away. There is no weather condition that could possible affect his agenda, he loves the rain. He is a hard working man, with experience in all trades; from fishing, gold digger, carpenter, chef, farmer and more. I find something new in every one of our meeting, very humble and wise with a practical vision of life. “No es proooobleema!”

He lives in his house with his wife; Cornelia of over 30 years, Son; Nelson, daughter; Rosali, son in law; Edwin and grand children; Daisy and Edwin Jr. Next door lives his son; Kennedy, daughter in law; Olivia and grand children; Melanie and Kennedy Jr. With the exception of Kennedy Sr., we have met them all.



Rosali and I spent some time by the creek doing laundry… well, she was doing the laundry and I was doing the watching and chatting. She made it look so simple and fun, I really wanted to take over her load, but she may have felt uncomfortable. We had a nice and relaxed visit (despite all the scrubbing and squeezing). Her husband, Edwin, invited Matt, or Matt invited Edwin to go fishing in the dugout canoe… theirs. It was a successful outing! They caught more than 30 littlelus fishelus. (I better get the real name…”Jurel”) of which Matt came home with 7 that reside in the fridge until we get the scoop on how to cook such specie. Olivia, Domingo’s daughter in law, rowed to us yesterday to introduce herself, to offered fruits for sale and ask if we had ice we could share. Ice in here has a silver value; for them to get ice or any cold item they have to travel by boat 2 hours to the bigger town. Our freezer is the size of a shoe box, pretty small, but we manage to produce 2 trays of ice every 3 days. We gave one away and we got a papaya, bananas and fish in exchange.

Island hopping

Isla Venado, Isla Cavada and Isla Brincanco

6 days

Nice anchorages, bad weather, big swells in between the islets.

All Matt’s fantasies and pretend play of being stranded on an island when he was little, or…until this day, have become partially real during our passages in Panama, I say partially because we are not really stranded and I am probably not the Bo Derek he had pictured. So here we were in the islands searching for water, creating ways to collect it with bamboo and old leaves to redirect the flow, making ropes out of vines, building fires, washing the clothes in a waterfall, fishing, snorkeling, finding shady spots to relax on a swaying hammock and best of all doing it all for free. I must confess though, the fishing… what a disappointment. All we have gotten lately are the “rejects” (Bonito, Jacks and the ones the fish book describes as “it may taste good when there is nothing else to eat”). Matt discovered that fish go crazy with pork meat… he saved a few pieces from his dinner. As soon as he put the hook in the water with the meat, a big number of fish would come around and take it. Matt said to me very proudly “the pork is working great!”, my words back were… “its working great for the fish, but no so good for us”. I must have discouraged him because the fishing ended and no fish was put on the table.

I would imagine that as time goes by, adventures like this at a cost like this won’t be able to be repeated. Many of the islands have been purchased by foreigners and it is only a matter of time before they find a way to make money of the visitors. Other islands are in the hands of the government who has transformed them into National Parks, making them either a no landing zone or the fee to enter is unaffordable. Such was the case of Isla Coiba. It would have cost us over $100 a day to be there. We skipped several with sorrow, but I guess we don’t have to see all the islands to feel that we have seen paradise, we don’t have the time to see all the islands and we don’t deserve to see more beauty than what we have already seen!

The murder case

Pedregal was a good place to do laundry, touring inland and to provision inexpensively, but I felt that our safety was threaten due to the piracy stories we heard, one of those, the most recent and the creepiest was the murder case.

Father, son from Denmark and daughter in law from Panama, living in a sailboat for quite sometime, anchored close to the town for a little longer than 3 months, the son is shot in the back, the wife (daughter in law) hit on the head and the father killed with a shot in the leg. Who did it? It’s still a mystery. I have heard three versions, theirs and the one of the locals. Their story is that the attackers were 5 men who came to steal. They took a laptop computer and nothing else. The locals theory: The son killed the father as a result of a dispute or they were involved in some dark business and the killing was a retaliation or a warning. It seems as if the shot to the father was not meant to be a shot to kill, because it was to the leg, but he didn’t get fast enough medical attention… In any case, there was a murder and it was here.

The day we left, we were caught in a heavy down pore that forced us to anchor for the night. I was awaken by the VHF radio around 1 AM, someone whistles, he is calling someone else. 1001 thoughts went through my head; it’s a code!. Ganymede was right behind us, but too far away to feel that we were safe by number....I realized the story had left me extremely paranoid. Although I tried really hard to disregard the radio I couldn’t and I had to go outside the boat to make sure no one else was around.. surprise! There was a little fishing boat, a “panga”, maybe 100 feet away from us, just floating. I let Matt know about them and I went to bed hoping that they were just plain, good old fishermen but at the same time, I run a mental inventory of all our weapons of defense. Matt on the other hand, remained on watch. He would get up at different intervals to make sure they were keeping their distance.

The morning came and they were gone! I concluded: they were plain, old fishermen and/or we were surrounded by forceful guardian angels. Later that morning we were blessed by the approach of a local man in his boat who came with a bag full of fruits and a stock of bananas that currently hangs on the back of Endurance. His name was Bolivar Camacho, known as Camacho. He chatted with us for a while, invited us to his farm near by and gave us his version of the murder case.

In Search of our Friends; Ganymede.

A power boat anchored beside us saw Ganymede come and go. They left yesterday at high tide to Boca Chica, We are in Boca Chica and Ganymede is not anchored where all the other boats are. Matt suggested going up the river a little further… There they were! We see them. We put the motor in full thrudle and went, the girls are excited, we are excited we are almost at the point of singing larai-larai-la la… when we hear a loud whistle.. OH NOOO!! Matt maneuvers quickly, the boat is turned as fast as possible and the verbal manifestation of having been terribly scared came out of my sweet husband’s mouth. Right there no more than 2 yards away were the electric cables crossing our path. We don’t know for sure if we would have made it under and across or with it and a RIP cross.. Some local fishermen told us that we could, so we tried again. Again we had to turn around. We will try again tomorrow. Now the whistle was not for the cable as we found out, but for a rock straight ahead of us. Cable or rock, the boat would have been toasted!

We are now anchored where everyone else is anchored and Ganymede is up the river. Matt got in the dinghy and went to see them. We were surprised! Very surprised to hear his statement “if I knew there was going to be another sailing passage like the one the night we left, I quit! Ben, his wife Danielle and her 3 daughters (all under 6) are full time sailors, fully committed and purist, they build their own boat, the travel with the bare minimum equipment, they write articles for sailing magazines, they are hard core sailors ( In my opinion). This whole time I was thinking he would put up with any sailing conditions and returning to the point of origin due to fear was a complete no-no for them, but the truth is that he tried to turn around, but his motor could not handle it. The thought of calling a Mayday crossed his mind, but he realized that no one could have help fast enough before their boat would run into the rocks. He needed to stay focus and rely only in his ability. I feel for them as I did for us that night. It was a gale of 40 knots of wind and heavy rain that would make anyone wonder if sailing is so great after all. We all hated it that night!

Waking up in Isla Parida

I hear Matt get up, put the water in the stove, open the jar of Nescafe, drops one teaspoon in a cup, 1 teaspoon of sugar and then fill the cup with boiling water. The aroma spreads quickly all over the boat. I rolled over and commenced to picture myself getting up and having one of those. It usually takes me a while to go from the picturing it to the doing it, but today, I was excited, I wanted it to see the place where we had dropped the anchorage last night. An island! An island in Panama!... The thought of an island is illusive; I had the illusion that I look a few pounds thinner, totally fit and gorgeous, the same feeling I get when being into the cobalt blue or turquoise green beaches that I may have described before. Despite the reality crashing onto me, it was beautiful!

We are in Panama!

Successful and meorable were these 14 hours of beautiful sailing; whales, turtles and dolphins, good food, good games and the crossing to a new country. Now we are anchored in one of the many islands in the Pacific Coast of Panama. Our friends from Ganymede are not here? Where are they?