Update on Plans and Canal Transit

We are enjoying our time here in Shelter Bay Marina. The facilities are nice, they have excellent showers, a pool, restaurant/bar, WIFI (that mostly works), and lots of interesting boats in and out every day. See the photo here of Tahina in her slip here at the marina. It is a long ride into town to stores though – about 30 minutes or much longer if you get held up at the canal waiting for ships to enter/exit. There is a swing bridge that lets cars and trucks through when the locks are in use.

We worked this week on setting up for our canal transit. We hired a canal agent named Stanley (who often works with boats here in Shelter Bay Marina) to help do the paperwork. Initially I was concerned because he seemed distracted and was late on a few action items. But, there was extenuating circumstances due to several boats being delayed because of canal workers reporting in sick. This caused a backlog of work, and a lot of concerns by people waiting in line. But, the problem seemed to be resolved and boats started moving again.

David and Edel helped us clean up the boat upon our arrival, and after two days departed Tahina to go do some sightseeing in Panama. They were hoping to come back and help us with the transit, but we just found out they decided to do a hiking trip and may not be back in time. We were sad to see them leave, we really enjoyed having them on Tahina.

Here are some photos of Shelter Bay Marina, and a shot of David and Edel before they left:

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We had our boat measured on Wednesday. Unfortunately, despite two tries at measuring, the results were that our boat was just 0.07 meters too long. We ended up having to pay an additional US $250 because we measured over 50 feet in length overall. Ugh! But, the good news is that we got a date scheduled for our transit of Tuesday, 23rd of March. So, we won’t be delayed too long here in the marina.

We spent a day yesterday going to Colon to do major provisioning shopping. We ended up with well over 200lbs of goods after two trips. We are attempting to buy enough of the long-term supplies to get us to New Zealand in November. Food costs are high in the south Pacific. So, the more we can buy now (Panama is relatively inexpensive), the better. I had trouble again with our credit card not being approved. Had to run to find a payphone and talk to security people to get it cleared..and then it STILL didn’t work. So, I ended up running around to find an ATM machine that worked and had to draw out cash. What a pain! The store was still happy enough with our huge purchases to have a truck transport us and our huge load back to the marina.

We hope to have an announcement soon with regards to our crew for the long passages.

Meanwhile, I have started exploring the jungle near the marina. There used to be a US military base here and I’ve found at least two gun batteries out in the jungle. Very cool stuff, and I’ll be posting photos of them soon.