Once again after about 5 days, marina fever sets in so we spent a few days on anchor at various spots in the Bocas del Toro region about 10 miles from the Red Frog Marina. We were hit by a fierce thunderstorm at midnight (is there any better time?) near the Panamanian mainland in Logan Bight. It was all hands on deck as this one was accompanied by wind which swung us towards land and with torrential rain, Maynard started the engines and radars and realised one of the radars wasn’t working and the other had an issue. Well that’s just great and what a good time to find out! Luckily the anchor held, the storm abated and the following day was spent tracing the problem. After a bit of effort, one radar is working but Mike and Maynard are still working on finding out why our 48 mile radar is stuck in sleep mode.
We met a few of the local inhabitants, one who brought his beautiful little child wearing gumboots in his leaky panga over to Vanish. I ran inside to find her a stuffed kangaroo toy and held it out for her to take. I had the feeling that this was her first ever toy as she didn’t understand how to take it from me so I had to hold her arm, open her hand and I placed it gently in her palm. She squeezed the fur and touched the roo’s plastic eyes and looked up with such a lovely shy smile. These people have very little but all of them seem happy and are a joy to talk to when they drop by. Another visitor Ricardo told us to take our dinghy up a jungle mangrove creek to look for monkeys which he’d seen yesterday but we couldn’t find them. The only one we have seen was a pet capuchin monkey in Bocas Town one day. We couldn’t swim in the bays near the mainland as they were so full of massive clusters of jellyfish clinging together. The locals told us that we would vomit if we were stung by these cluster jellies. We found some good snorkelling and swimming areas offshore then headed back to our temporary home at Red Frog Marina while we awaited Prent’s arrival, Maynard’s work colleague from Louisiana who is here for the week.
There are a few Aussies in the marina at present and coincidentally one of them is Stuart Broom and his wife Suzie. Stuart goes back a long way as we competed against him in the Hamilton Island Big Boat Series in 1999 and he was on board a yacht which t-boned Cruz by accident on our port side (he was not on the helm though). We both remembered it well and reminisced about those ‘good ‘ol days’. They are crewing on a yacht and heading to Jamaica after hurricane season. We also learned that this is a very big week for all Panamanias as they celebrate 4 holidays this week; the Day of the Dead on Nov 2, Separation Day Nov 3, Flag Day Nov 4, Colon Day Nov 5 and yet another holiday on Nov 10 for the Uprising in the Villa de Los Santos. Our previously deserted beautiful Red Frog Beach was filled with over 1,200 people yesterday on Separation Day (Panama’s equivalent of 4th July) with a constant stream of partying pangas bringing visitors to and from the mainland and Bocas Town to the beach with DJ’s, rock music, beer games, and a fair bit of activity not allowed elsewhere. Today, a Panamanian Navy patrol boat has decided it’s time to make its presence felt and things are a little more under control it seems. Once Maynard and Prent have completed their work commitments, we will be looking for the first weather window to head north.