We are now at Shelter Bay Marina, our friends on Optical Illusion and Warren and Peace have arrived, it was great to get together and have a visit with them. They will only be here for a couple of days and then they are off to the San Blas, etc.

We started to make arrangement to leave the boat on the hard at Shelter Bay and were busy putting it to bed. This involves washing all of the walls, drawers, bilges, etc with Vinigar and water. Vacuum sealing all of the lines and some of the food items, washing and waxing the outside of the boat, taking down all of the lines and making sure everything is sealed and covered. We were pretty much done this when we started re-evaluating our decision to leave the boat here on the hard and to come back next year and do more fo the San Blas. We talked to a lot of the cruisers that had come from the caribbean and gathered more info on the areas we had planned on visiting. There are many things in addition to this that we took into consideration before making our decision to start investigating shipping the boat home as another option. Next year was going to be our last year of offshore cruising anyway. As many of you know we have decided to ship the boat home. We were going to use Yachtpath but found out while we were in negotiations that they had filed Chapter 11. We found out there was another shipping company heading to Victoria but we have to get the boat to Golfito as they do not pick up in Colon. So all is set and we will be heading to Golfito to ship the boat home, we are very much looking forward to seeing family and friends and sailing our local waters this summer. Our transit date for the canal is Tuesday April 2nd, we will now be heading West back to the Pacific.