February and March/ 2012

Got a rare treat in February with a visit from old friend Gary Brodie minus his other half (Nellie) but bringing our youngest nephew Adam along for the ride. The two were met by Allayne and Deb who were combining provisioning with a girls freedom weekend in Panama City and also picking up Gail, Allayne's sister. The boys took the jeep trip over the mountains to Kuna Yala to Rio Carti where I picked them up. Early on the Monday they were followed by the girls and with a full load of groceries and passengers we headed out across the channel to the East Lemons where Audrey Paige was anchored. It was a rough, rolly downwind ride for Gail and Adam neither of whom were sailors but we pulled in by one pm and everybody hit the water for some r&r. The next ten days were spent doing a circular trip around the San Blas taking in the Lemons, Esnedup, the Hollandaise and Saladup. Most of the time snorkelling, fishing and just laying back. Finally with the visit over the two climbed into a little six seat plane at Nargana for an exciting exit flying over the reefs and back to Panama city where they got a quick tour of the canal zone before heading back to Canada. During the visit we had received the first rumblings of trouble back home with my ailing father.We had promised to help Audrey Paige sail back to the states in early April but with Dads condition up in the air things were in a state of flux. We got to work readying the boat for haul out to and started packing non essentials away while waiting for the weather to settle enough to slip the hook. The winds lulled for a bit so we headed up through the channels running in the lee of the outer islands to get to Porvenir where we would wait for the winds to die enough to run for Linton furtherer to the north and a day sail from Colon. From Porvenir you check out getting the necessary internal zarpe which allows you to move around the country. There are very few countries now where as a foreign vessel you are allowed to move around freely. It was a full two week wait for the weather and even then we had to pick a day we normally wouldn’t have ventured out. The first two hours were very bumpy as we clawed our way out in twenty plus knots and ten foot rollers and past the reefs heading further off shore than the other six boats that also left. We finally managed to get the boat sails balanced and left the rest up to the wind vane combined with tiller auto pilot set up and ended up a very fast run arriving off of Linton mid afternoon. With daylight to spare we decided to push on and pulled into Portobello around five o’clock dropping the hook. We spent the next couple of days tidying up the boat and then headed into Shelter Bay Marina to prepare the boat for haul out and storage. Two days after she was hauled we moved our travel kits onto Audrey page and headed out the canal zone breakwater north on the 1500 mile sail to Key West. To be cont.