S/V Carina: Great Lakes and Caribbean Sailing
Follow the adventures of S/V Carina as her crew plies the waters of the Great Lakes and beyond.
| Vessel Name: | Carina |
| Vessel Make/Model: | Catalina 34 |
| Hailing Port: | Milwaukee, WI |
21 April 2017
A new adventure in the British Virgin Islands
Early Saturday we fly to the USVI and then take the ferry to Tortola, BVI, where we will board our bare boat at Marine Max for 7 days of enjoyment. Stay tuned and watch our progress!
03 March 2016
Compelled to turn back ...
It is now March 3 and I find myself in the Courtyard Panama Hotel in Panama City's Megamall Mall waiting to fly back to Wisconsin. I'm not in Honduras, Mexico or Cuba! How did this happen? There are many reasons!
24 February 2016
We are casting off,
We are off to Honduras this morning (Wednesday) at first light. We started to cast off Monday morning but an oil leak and a broken piece of deck gear required us to tie back up. We zipped back to Panama City to get the gear replacement and we located the oil leak and fixed it. What does this all mean? It's an older sailboat! Things break. We have learned the systems over the past 2 weeks and now feel that we can safely travel the first leg. We'll be out of internet range for the next 6 days so stay tuned to our satellite fixes on the Google Maps portion of the web site.
21 February 2016
Saturday Night
It's Saturday night, February 20, 2016, in Shelter Bay Marina, Colon, Panama and tonight is party night! Folks with guitars, harmonicas, good voices and dancing feet gather together on the patio in front of "The Dock" restaurant, next to the marina pool and mini-mart. Visitors here have come by sailboat, [...]
20 February 2016
Bureaucracy!
Bureaucracy is a fact of life. On Friday we checked with the Captain of the Port to make arrangements to check out of Panama. The weather window for sailing to Roatan, Honduras looked very good for a Saturday morning departure. The Captain of the Port had other ideas, however. It seems that our cruising [...]
18 February 2016
More Progress
Cast off is imminent. We have a couple of more details to iron out but it looks like we will leave Shelter Bay Marina on Saturday at noon. We will steer 356 degrees for 2 days before turning more westerly to steer toward Roatan, Honduras.
More Progress
We've learned that Hurricane Mitch wiped out most of Islas Guanaja, our original destination, and that recovery has been slow and services are very limited. So we are off to Roatan.
We have enjoyed our stay in Panama but are eager to get some sea miles under our feet. The Colon to Roatan leg will be our longest, taking about 6 days. The winds will be NNE to ENE at 15 - 25 kts with an underlying NW current at 1 - 2 kts.
Today we returned our rental car to the Tocumen (Panama City) airport and used a series of busses and taxis to make our way back to Shelter Bay. The trip that takes 1.5 hours by car took closer to 4 hours but it brought us closer to the people of the region. The families are poor according to US standards but they are primarily honest and family oriented.
The malls downtown are bustling even though items cost much more than in the US. And, of course, the ocean front "gold coast" of Panama City is crammed with luxury high-rise condominiums that appear to be 30 stories tall. One of the buildings looks like a spinnaker sail under full down-wind run. Traffic for the most part is unbearable and the roads are in great need of repair (doesn't the repair part sound like where many US cities have been lately, too?!) but people somehow get around.
Traffic jams are common and I've learned that you can use your car horn to speak to other drivers by the duration and
timing of your beep!
