Dave Ungless
Photo: Hauled out joy...
Each evening, before finishing up, Marie and I have the same conversation. What was going to be worse... wading thigh-deep to cross the fast-flowing river, the long walk in the stifling humidity to San Carlos or one more night in Ollie's El Capitan guest house? We'd long decided that we couldn't at this time stay onboard
Sänna - the interior is in such bad state after eighteen months abandoned in Panama, it was gonna take at least another two weeks before she was anything like shipshape. Once more we agreed - it was the overnight confinement in the gloom of
El Capitan.
Not that El Capitan is anything like the worse place we've ever stayed, but it's the bunkbeds in the windowless bunkhouse rattled by the din of the air conditioning, there is nothing to do except lie on the bed glued to our devices - no bars or restaurants in the nearby village of San Carlos, everything is closed because of covid. So, in the manner of two weary explorers, we descend the ladder down to the boatyard roadway, we cross the breakwater to the tidal deluge of the river, decide where the ever-changing sandbanks offers the safest crossing, we wade across thigh-deep, precariously, then walk the abandoned public beach in the twilight darkness to the road before we trekk the half-mile or so to the locked gate of El Capitan. Then the bit I dread the most - Ollie's five free-roaming dogs. The dogs are friendly enough, delightful in their own way, but once thru the locked gate then comes Dante's hell - the walk in the by now darkness thru dog-shit alley. Every night I feel the soft warm experience between my feet and toes, that gleeful sensation when you know you've trod in something you'd rather not, the ritual of washing my feet and flip-flops under the cold running tap before unlocking the bunkhouse kitchen door into freedom sanctuary. Marie, somehow, never treads in anything.
The defects list on
Sänna is horrendous. The radar has seized, so has the fridge, so too both toilet heads, the cockpit lights, Raymarine instruments, the anchor windlass, our watermaker... the list goes on and on - even our expensive ornamental brass maritime clock has locked up solid. Both of us are bewildered and downhearted, we knew it would be bad but not like this. Marie comes up with the answer... to get thru the workload without falling down we need to take a break. Marie suggests we make the four-hour bus ride into Panama City at the weekend, the historic old town quarter, joy, bars & restaurants, a nice cheap hotel then back to the Monday morning drudgery in the Vista Mar boatyard.
In the end, somehow, we got thru, we launch
Sänna back into the water then withstood the relentless surge of the Pacific Ocean that blights this marina. We have made new friends, Richard & Caroline on the English sailboat
Midnight Breeze. Henry joins us from England - it all suddenly comes together. Marie suggests we go for the Panama Canal - we're not ready I say, but Marie insists, we need the break, we need to achieve, we've gotta have the challenge. Without even half the onboard problems fixed we head south to the canal, I declare on the canal authority forms that we are safe and seaworthy when I know we're not - we're nowhere near. I check tick boxes on the authority form that I should never have ticked but we get given a transit date - we're ready to leave the pacific ocean to go thru the Panama Canal. Nearly ten years in the pacific but we think nothing of it when the canal pilot climbs aboard at the number four red buoy…
Bastard covid, bastard bastard covid - wading the river, treading in dog shit...
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Read more about the mishaps and mayhem of
Nellie, The Ship's Cat