Saturday, July 4, 2009, Mexico to Panama (condensed version)

by Bob

Here are a bunch of pictures: http://crusto.com/panama

Panama! I think there is a song about that. Or maybe that was Ipanema. The Minnow is in Flamenco Marina outside the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. We hope to go through the canal on Monday.

I'll backtrack. After Socorro we did get to Acapulco. At our next port someone told us that 28 people were gunned down in drugger fights while we were. But we didn't notice anything unusual, except that there wasn't much business at the Acapulco marina.

We headed out of Acapulco for some favorable winds to Cost Rica. But the winds ended up not being so favorable. In fact, we were motoring directly into 30-35 knots winds and their associated waves for a day or two. Then Mike broke the boat.

I was sleeping, and he woke me up. After the mental haze cleared a bit, I noticed that the forestay was flopping around. The forestay is the cable that holds the big sail in front, and it holds the mast forward. Luckily we have two of them, and the other one was in good shape and holding the mast. A shackle had broken or come loose, turning loose the bowsprit and breaking a metal piece, which turned loose the forestay.

We headed for the nearest port, Huatulco, had the broken piece welded, got diesel, replaced the radome (the stay broke it when it was flopping around), got a battery, fixed a few other things, and headed out again in one day. That was pretty good, I thought.

Some other people at Huatulco expected Mike and I to sink the boat when we crossed the gulf of Tehuantepec. I guess they didn't have access to weather forecasts. But I will admit that Mike and I don't appear to be competent sailors. Or competent at anything.

The wind and waves were good all the way to Costa Rica, although we had to motor a good part of the trip.

In Costa Rica we docked for a day, played around, picked up an unsuspecting passenger (Fullerton), got diesel, and headed out the next day for Isla del Cocos, or Cocos Island, or something like that. It's a couple hundred miles off the coast of Costa Rica, a nature preserve. They claim it's the largest uninhabited island in the world, but I don't think they considered places like Kiska Island or Amchitka Island.

On the way to Isla del Cocos, we caught a giant Pacific Blue Marlin. It was 115 inches (29,210,000,000 angstroms) long, maybe 400 or 600 lbs. I'm not sure how long it took to bring it in, but it was daylight when I started reeling it in, and dark when we finally got in onto the boat. We had 80 lb test line, and the hook pretty much fell out of the fish's mouth when we had it on the boat. It was pretty exciting.

At Cocos we dived there three times, hiked and kayaked, and then headed northeast to Panama. There are a lot of sharks there. They're mostly white-tipped sharks, but we saw a few hammerheads. There are lots of birds around the island, too. There is supposed to be a lot of treasure there, too. But we couldn't even find a geocache, let alone treasure.

We had a pleasant down-wind ride to Panama, complete with dolphin escorts much of the time. Fullerton took on some kite therapy in a futile attempt to regain some sanity.



Shortly before we got to the entry of the Panama Canal, there was a big thunderstorm with wind, lightning, heavy rain -- just like home. We couldn't see very well, but we missed that big ship coming out of the canal channel by at least a hundred yards due to our inept seamanship and superior luck.

We are now docked. We only have to repair one rudder, because the bums at Webasto wouldn't send us parts we need for air conditioner repair. Some electrical parts in the air conditioner control box caught on fire. This happened just two weeks after the air conditioner was "repaired" by a Webasto service center.

We didn't realize it until I noticed some black smoke stains on the metal control box down in the engine room. (Of course, the air conditioner wouldn't run, but that is not unusual for this air conditioner.)

So I tried to order parts. They said we had to order from a dealer. I asked for a referral to a dealer who had them in stock and could ship them to us, and they gave me Thomas Marine in Miami. Those guys were real jerks, and after a dozen or more phone calls and emails to Thomas Marine and Webasto, we still can't get parts. The moral of this story is that if you buy Webasto, don't catch it on fire.