Wind NNE@8-15kn
09-Feb-2012, Las Perlas Islands, Panama; anchored south of Isla Contadora

After having Namani moored at the Balboa Yacht Club for a few weeks now (which included a trip back to Germany), we decided that we may as well do our remaining boat jobs somewhere at anchor. So we slipped our mooring this morning and took off for Las Perlas, an island group about 40 nm SE of Balboa/Panama City. With a forecast for light northerly winds we feared we might be motoring the whole stretch. Against expectations we did have a really nice sail however, close reaching in about 15kn from the NE. We even got to enjoy the company of 10-12 spotted dolphins who played in Namani's bow wave for a while, and we did see a whale breaching. At about 5 pm we dropped the hook in the lee of Isla Contadora, enjoying the increased length of our new anchor chain (we swapped our old 35 meters of 10mm stainless steel against 75 meters of 5/16" galvanized high-test/G4 - Adrian on Attilla got a good deal on the old chain ;-)



It sure felt good to be sailing again and even Namani seemed happy to be under way again. Now we plan to spend 5-6 days in Las Perlas while working the job list. As the saying goes: "Cruising is about fixing your boat in nice places"... If all goes well we will be leaving for the Galapagos by the end of February. Stay tuned...

08 - In Panama

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17-Jan-2012, Balboa Yacht Club, Panama

The picture above shows Namani in the Miraflores as captured by the Canal webcam (thanks Paul for the screenshot!). If you look carefully you can even see the "Wimpelkette" running from the top of the mast to the end of the boom!

The picture was taken on Sunday on our way "down" to the Pacific. On Saturday we transited with two other verssels up to Gatun Lake: "Clipper Mercury", a 600 ft cargo ship, and "Share-E", 70ft sport fisher we tied up to. The image below shows the page from the official southbound canal transit schedule for 14JAN with these three boats (click on the image to enlarge).



Nicky has actually gone through all the schedule pages for last Saturday and charted the 45 vessels the transited southbound on 14JAN by size. No surprise, Namani was the smallest of them all...

08 - In Panama

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15-Jan-2012, Moored at the Balboa Yacht Club

A little more thn four years ago we wrote a blog entry "Bye bye Mediterranean, hello Atlantic". Now it's "Bye bye Atlantic, hello Pacific".

At about 1230 local time today we exited the Miraflores Lock and Namani moved into the Pacific! We had an easy transit today, tying up alongside one of the Canal tourist boats in each of the locks, which also made for a quick transit. Thanks very much to our Canal Advisors, Carlos (Saturday, Gatun Locks) and "Astro" (Sunday, Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks) and to our great line-handler crew, Sylvia, Victor and Hobin. Sorry you didn't get the full "monkey fist experience" but you were great crew to have aboard in any case!

Now we will stay here for a few days to run errands in the city and potentially also do another transit on Ann Lucia as line-handlers.

PS: Nana's brother Paul took some screenhots of the Canal webcam, showing Namani in Miraflores Lock. We'll post these when we have internet access again.

08 - In Panama

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