log

Ah, an empty boat and no guests this month. What to do... what to do? Well, the first answer is, gratefully, nothing. Mary and Don left us and we stayed safely tucked away below deck in the same favoured anchoring spot for nearly 2 weeks before we…

Visitors visitors visitors... We've been very lucky in Bocas del Toro as the enforced staying put (i.e. mainsail explosion) means that our friends and family have manged to pin us down long enough to come and visit. And visit they have in droves,…

You know what they say about London buses? That you wait for ages and then suddenly three come at once. Well, Panama's Bocas del Toro has been a bit like that for us and visitors. We've just had our third set of boat guest here and are about to…

Those of you who have been jealous of all our fine Caribbean sunshine will feel vindicated by this post. It is rainy season in Panama and we expected a lot of downpours during the time we spent here. However, what we didn’t know is that the locals…

Ish, our Texan stowaway, left us yesterday but I thought I should add a note in her honour as, thanks to her shutterbug tendancies, we have a whole stack of fantastic photos on the surroundings page. I am still without my little camera thanks to…

Our arrival into Bocas del Toro Panama is a bit of a milestone. It means we’ve been on the sea for 8 months (at the time of writing it was June 11th) and are almost done with the Caribbean. It’s a natural time of reflection as getting to Panama…

Sod’s law that after covering nearly 8,000 miles in the last 8 months we would have our worst ever weather just 5 miles from our last major Caribbean destination: Bocas del Toro, Panama. I don’t think our families were particularly concerned about…

The crossing from Cienfuegos, Cuba, to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, took us 3 and a half days and was a fairly straightforward and non-eventful passage. Since our trip from the BVI’s to Cuba, James and I are a lot more comfortable doing longer passages…

I love our anchor. We’ve anchored in so many places, so many times, that the two of us have a very good, quick system in place for dropping the hook. We always check how well we are set and log our GPS position and have never really had any major…

It is 3:30am and we are both awake. There are storms coming in from Florida and there have been warnings of them all week as a cold front stretches from Miami all the way to North East Honduras. There is talk of 40knot winds, high seas, heavy rain,…

In order to separate the flesh of a fresh conch from its bone it is important to make a hole in its shell one ring in from the outside at an angle the same as 2 o’clock on a clock’s face – Valois taught us that. Similarly, when laying a second…

Now that it is April we can relish the fact that its mango season. However, we don’t get our mangos from the shop or the market… no, now we get them in darkness in the bushes. Welcome to Cuba, communist land where no man owns what he works for. Here…

I’d just nodded off and am jolted awake by the incessant thumping of the officer’s fingers pounding the computer keys as he continues to write up our statement. It’s 5am and James and I are still at the police station, having escaped the drugs…