It still looks like a big mound of -------
27 January 2016 | Isla Taboga Panama
Dan, hot and tropical
Yep working on the boat while on a mooring is a chore. The bouncing, the rather sketchy dinghy access, everything is just harder. Combine that with water trips, extreme -20+ foot- tides and you start to feel a bit overwhelmed. But as I sit writing this in the cockpit with a little movement from the slight chop, a gentle breeze of about 5-8 knots and temps dropping into the mid to lower 80’s and expecting it to get down to about 72 by morning, a little of the reasons why we do all of this come to the fore.
I see what we call “the city of lights” as all of the ships waiting to transit the canal are lit up like mini neighborhoods- currently I see about 40-50 big ships.
On shore at Isla Taboga the village is quiet, waiting for the weekend festivities to begin again and we are preparing to sleep under the stars once again- not so bad.
But- we did have some fun over the last few days as we went through the efforts of renewing our cruising permit and our “visa mariner” which gives us a year here without the question of “How do you expect to leave” when we fly in and out. Port Captain office- piece of cake, though it takes two days to bake- Immigration damn- now that is a piece of cake as well, but it tastes $%#@. That should have been a simple stop, but nooooo, they seem to actually enjoy telling you that they need more of this, more of that , one of these and two of those. And all of these instructions in rapid fire Spanish. Hard to keep smiling. If I hear of anyone complaining about the simple courtesy of having other languages available in the states for folks trying to negotiate the government agencies I may punch them. It is really difficult when you don’t know the language and I completely sympathize with those who are struggling to learn English. The funny thing is, I do speak enough Spanish to be almost intelligible but……..
Anyway, as you can imagine, I did get to carry things, so the day was a success. Because that is what we do- carry stuff.