San Blas April – Food

After two months in the San Blas the galley is bare. Ah, separating want from need. After a lifetime of lessons still such a struggle. Living on a small boat where your total living space is about the size of an average kitchen you learn to put things in perspective. When we left to go sailing we had no idea what the future might hold. After 36 years of accumulating we had to go way beyond the usual rites of downsizing shifting a life time of goods to various family members and surrendering the rest to charities like GoodWill. When the dust had cleared we were left with a ten by ten room of family mementoes, twenty some years of business records and a reduced library of hardbacks and music which still comprised the largest part of the storage area.
Six years of boat life and a Camino trek still leave me shedding more goods every time I return home for a visit. When we left Toronto we were immersed in sea advice and had fully loaded the vessel with canned goods and personal favourites, as if that half dozen jars of smooth Jiffy peanut butter might be the last we see for years and that even after severe rationing. Never mind we were leaving for and transiting the heaviest and most cosmopolitan areas of the eastern seaboard. We had taken so much advice on what was must have marine items that I swear we look like the Clampetts coming down the ICW. Six years later we have gained much of our waterline back and the sage advice of “if you haven’t used it for six months get rid of it” holds for the most part. Certainly advances like IPods and EReaders have allowed us to gain back some of our limited shelve space. Same goes with boat equipment. Most of what we were told was either nonsense or redundant and today we are a pretty stripped down vessel by modern comparisons. After all it was meant to sail not become a condo. Of course some of that was dictated by our older narrow designed boat and in any case we are certainly not what would be considered a high tech boat. Two people, organised, can live comfortably without feeling like you are camping.

We had loaded up on supplies before leaving from Cartagena but slowly as the days dripped by all the goodies get eaten up and you are down to canned goods and whatever fresh vegetables you can buy from the Kuna Indians. I mean you can only eat so many sardines! I keep having the recurring dream where I have walked in a supermarket at home and break in the song” Food Glorious Food” from the musical “ Oliver” heels clicking me down the aisles. To leave the area would require two day hops down the coast to Linton or Portobello and then a bus out and a loaded taxi ride back to the anchorage. The other options were to fly and pay some incredible freight charges or take the new unfinished Kuna road only open during the dry season.
This would involve sailing over to the Carti islands and then paying a driver to ford you over a river, the Cordillera range and into Panama City. Sounded like a scenario from the movie “Wages of Fear”. In Panama City a cornucopia of modern grocery supermarkets, luxury hotels, hot water and sat TV waited. Kind of like Oz.
We took the boat down to a Carti and made arrangements to reciprocate boat watches with a sister ship Sojourn later in the month. Dawn found us with Dennis and Allayne from Audrey Paige and other cruisers waiting at an abandoned airstrip crowded with Kuna. We had to grease some palms with a couple of bucks each to pass through and then found a driver with a four wheeler who for twenty five a head agreed to drive us through the Kuna frontier post and across the mountain ridge. Short one seat and with Dennis pleading claustrophobia I drew the short straw and I had to ride in the back in the open storage area. The driver wore a high stiff collar black shirt with a sequin design and slicked back hair. I immediately christened him Elvis and while he didn’t speak a word of English he knew how to hum the tunes. The trip was interrupted by two breakdowns something to do with the timing. That could have had something to do with his driving which had us thinking we had a train to catch as he spun the gravel off the road at every turn. The girls sat with one arm on the forward seat the entire way over the mountains. Each breakdown Dennis helped under the hood.
We spent two days in Panama City acting like sailors on shore leave trying to cram the most into the least, loading up the hotel rooms with goods and eating out. We were told just to show up at the Cinco de Mayo square but with all of our goods we would have been a regular caravan so Allayne arranged for another driver to pick us up at the hotel as we sucked up the last A/C and internet we would see for the foreseeable future. I took the girls out to visit ATMs and a bit of last minute running around as Dennis prepared to load the vehicle. After a quick stop at Rotten Ronnie’s to buy the driver lunch we hit the dirt road an hour later and the adventure started. We ended up with two flat tires and stuck in a river. Both times on the tires I played class clown with the girls while Dennis helped the driver strip down one bare tire for a completely bald one. We limped back into the airstrip around 4pm and then negotiated with a supply canoe to deliver us and goods back to the boats. One of the American boats had gone up on the reef and after some work was freed. They had been using an all rope anchor rode and got caught in a wind reversal. Dennis later described it as the trip from hell but I kind of thought it was pretty cool about as close to National Geographic adventure as I am going to get.

To be continued......