It’s funny to think that when we sailed into Shelter Bay Marina on July 28^th we had only planned to be here a few days. We have now been at the marina for almost two months! As you already know, there is a very good reason for our extended stay here – our new boat, Morning Star! Starship is all cleared out, cleaned up and ready to find her new owners. It’s sad to see her right now sitting empty, docked right beside us, but we have so many reasons to feel that Morning Star was a very good decision for us.

One of the first things we did when we arrived here was fulfill our promise to Dylan to find him a big juicy cheeseburger! Once his seasickness had subsided on our crossing from Jamaica, he talked endlessly about how much he craved a delicious cheeseburger and fries. There is a nice restaurant here called The Dock. Several times now we have treated ourselves to supper at the restaurant and I love those breaks from cooking on a hot boat. We do have air conditioning but it just does not keep up when the afternoon sun cranks the heat up hard on us.

The heat and humidity in Panama is often extremely high. We really need to limit how much we try to physically accomplish in an afternoon. This has had its challenges as we had been working hard at the big move of all our stuff from Starship to Morning Star. Wow, so it was a total ‘clown car’ experience emptying Starship! We cannot believe how much we had loaded into all the cupboards, drawers, lockers and storage areas on Starship. It felt like it took forever to organized ourselves on Morning Star but we finally feel pretty much settled in our new home.

Despite being moved in, we still are not able to set sail for the beautiful San Blas islands just yet. Morning Star needs a few upgrades. We are having the rigging redone here as well as other projects like having a new bimini and dodger made. We expect to be ready to go to San Blas by the end of October – that is the hope anyways. By December 1^st we will need to bring Morning Star back to the marina for an exciting reason…I will tell you why later! 😉

Here are some pictures and a video of Morning Star! We are thoroughly enjoying having the extra space and cannot wait to head out sailing again soon.

Other than the excitement of finding Morning Star…another thing we have really enjoyed here has been our walks in the jungle! The marina is right by the jungle so it’s so easy to just go for a walk and see amazing things! We love that!

Check out this video below here! Howler monkeys! They only grow to about 50 cm in height but listen to the terrifying sounds they make! They do that as a way to mark their territory and drive other males away. I also hear that they protect their area by throwing things like their urine and poop at people so we are told not to stand or walk under them! 💩

Our curiousity on our jungle walks would often take us to these barracks. Many of these structures are still standing on the former US army base. Fort Sherman used to be the primary defensive base for the Caribbean part of the Panama Canal. It was also the US jungle warfare training center. 

We have spotted a few different species of monkeys here and from what I have read, the monkeys in the video below are howler monkeys. That is interesting as what I had read described them as being very territorial (as I mentioned earlier in this blog) but we didn’t experience that. This day we found them to be friendly and perhaps as curious about us as we are of them. Maybe we just lucked into finding some very friendly ones. Although it would’ve been pretty funny to watch that one monkey throw its poop at Jason! 😆

I found these leaves to be so interesting! I later learned that they are called mimosa pudica and I was right – they will close as a defense against plant eating animals. Very cool! 🌿

As fascinating as the jungle is, there is one part of our stay here in Panama that has NOT been cool. Scary lightning! We have never in our lives seen such intense lightning. Since we have been here in the marina there have been I think three boats that have had direct lightning strikes. One of the strikes we actually saw happen! A boat on the dock beside us had a bolt come down and hit the top of its mast. I screamed as I watched sparks shower down onto its deck. Thankfully there was no one on it at the time. The problem is, it’s not only the boat that gets hit that gets damaged, often surrounding boats can also feel the effects of a strike and end up with costly damage. We are told that the lightning should ease up around the end of November and that cannot come soon enough.

The video above is not from the strike that we saw. Someone else caught this one a few weeks earlier. The electronics on many boats were impacted by this lightning hit that night.

There is a free app called WeatherBug that you can download onto your phone from the Apple Store. In this picture above, you can see we were in the midst of a big storm. The yellow lightning bolts show where lightning had hit within the half hour time period. Starship and Morning Star are located on F dock so they are towards the end on the dock closest to Calle Martin Road in the picture.

Fortunately, there is so much here to help take our minds off the lightning. There are great people, social events and a WhatsApp text group that brings many of us together. Wednesday nights there is an organized happy hour with half priced pizza at the restaurant and Sunday nights many of us have dinner together at the BBQ area.

Every Sunday, those who want to join in bring a side dish to share and their own meat to put on the grill. I usually bring my popular peas and rice dish but last Sunday I decided to try something sweet for dessert instead. The plan was to make brownies but I have not yet gotten used to my oven on Morning Star. Fortunately, I had Stella (from Beso del Viento) with me to help as it was an absolute gong show! We discovered we had the oven temperature way too hot as the parchment paper nearly caught fire. We yanked them out and scraped the half-baked brownie goo onto a greased baking pan to try again. In the end we were able to salvage just enough to take to the dinner. We found that multi-coloured, star shaped cake sprinkles helped make them look better!

Almost weekly a lady comes to the marina with fresh produce for sale and there is another lady who sells her homemade tamales! They are delicious and I will look forward to bying more next time she makes them.

Each wrapped in a massive banana leaf, some are made with pork and some are made with chicken – both types perfectly seasoned. They are quite large so $4 a piece is a great price. They freeze really well too. My guys aren’t keen on them so the five that I just bought are all mine! 😋

Without having a car, we have really appreciated the free (air conditioned!) shuttle bus the marina offers. Twice a day it goes to and from the city of Colon. About 10 minutes after leaving the marina we go over the impressive Puente Atlántico Bridge that spans the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal. We plan to take Morning Star through the Panama Canal towards the end of February.

The shuttle bus has a few spots where it stops but mostly we go to a great shopping area called Plaza Cuatro Altos. There we get our groceries from the very well price and well stocked store called Reys. The main currency here is USD as it is on par with the Panamanian balboa. Within the strip mall by Reys, there are many other great stores where you can do some seriously cheap shopping. Like we are talking 50 cent sunglasses, $2 t-shirts, $1.50 jewelry and I got a really cute dress for only $6. Sure, much of it is not super quality but not terrible either. The cheap prices we are finding on some items has been such a relief to us after the unbelievably high prices we paid for things in the Bahamas.

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Seriously…why do these 50 cent sunglasses have to have a security tag on them? 😎

Another day we went to a different shopping area. As we walked around, we started looking for a spot to stop for a coffee. We spotted a brightly lit up, colourful bus inside a restaurant and decided to check it out. After a nice chat with the young owner, Golan, we decided to ditch the coffee idea in exchange for a cold beer and a bite to eat at this very interesting looking restaurant and we are so glad we did! It is called En La Fonda located in the Colón 2000 Duty Free Mall. The restaurant was a gift to Golan from his mom when he graduated high school. In addition to running the restaurant, he is a university student and is very proud of En La Fonda. The unique, beautiful décor and delicious food made this one of the most memorable meals so far for us in Panama.

We are happy to see that Dylan is really enjoying Panama. Not only is he thrilled about the new boat but there are many kids here that are around the same age as him. Back in the Bahamas, we had met the family on the boat Beso del Viento and we are so happy to have caught up to them here. They actually are the ones who gave us the idea to come to Panama for hurricane season. Originally, we had planned to go to Granada for the hurricane months but we are so happy with our change in plans! Dylan loved being reunited with the kids on board, Stella and Sero. With them, and many other kids, Dylan has spent endless hours in the marina’s swimming pool, gone on walks exploring the area, enjoyed movie nights and the occasional boat sleepover. He was even invited to a birthday party! We got to know another lovely family on the boat called Big EmOceans who had two kids on board, Rosie and Jordan. They have now left for Columbia but during their stay here Rosie celebrated turning 12!🎂

As much as we are having some really fun times here, it’s been so much work too. As I mentioned earlier, the move on to Morning Star was a huge undertaking. We also needed to prep Starship to sell. This included Jason spending long hours in the blazing sun scrubbing the deck and hull while I cleaned inside and took the photos for the listings.

Now that Starship is listed and ready for showings, our attention has turned to the work needed on Morning Star. One of the biggest frustrations Jason has encountered here has been challenges with shipping. We have needed to order many boat parts and various items for Morning Star. The marina has a location in Maimi that does third party freight shipping due to the fact that it is hard to ship directly into Panama due to customs. Despite having that helpful system in place, it’s an extra cost and it adds extra delivery time. Other problems include the fact that time and time again we run into issues with US companies that are not set up to allow for online payment using a Canadian credit card. Living this life we always seem to find ways to make things work though. We’d like to do a big shout out to our friends Ryan and Maureen from the boat Surprise as they allowed us to use their US credit card for one of our purchases. That worked and we just reimbursed them the cost. Thanks to them, our new anchor should be arriving in about a week. We also had an issue where a package arrived at the Miami location open with an item missing. The process Jas has had to go through to try to get that situation resolved has been futile. I find it ironic that we have these shipping issues despite being right next one of the busiest shipping trade routes in the world – the Panama Canal! 🙄 We just need to keep the faith that one by one our packages will start arriving.

On September 9^th, Dylan became a grade 7 student! I feel I learned a lot from teaching him grade 6. Last year I discovered what works and what doesn’t when it comes to resources and teaching strategies. Despite only having a couple weeks under our belt in the new school year, we are really happy with how grade 7 is going. The marina also has a nice, big air-conditioned lounge so lately Dylan has enjoyed us doing school up there. 

Our days are busy with my remote work, school, boat projects and all the regular life stuff like cooking, groceries and laundry. This makesme feel like the days are just flying by lately. I have been forcing myself to take pauses to really appreciate where our life is at right now. Sometimes I just can’t believe that we are currently living in Central America on Morning Star. I am so thankful for all the work, prioritizing and decisions we needed to make to get us to where we are today. I am also thankful for what we are learning here. Being in Panama has put us in touch with many people who have sailed long passages on the Pacific. Some of these conversations have been very helpful for me as we mentally prepare for being on long, non-stop passages. Some of these passages may possibly be for as long as five weeks as we make our way to the French Polynesian Islands in the South Pacific. We are still assessing things but our original plan to break up the passages by stopping at the Galapagos Islands, is just not going to work. The increased fees and complicated requirements are just not going to work for us. I have an interest in possibly sailing down to Easter Island, then back up towards the French Polynesian Islands but we are not sure we want to head that far south. In several of our conversations with other sailors here, we are told that it’s a good idea to stay not too far off the equator. Storms are not able to develop on the equator due to earth’s spin. I found this fascinating and if you want to find out more, this link takes you to a great article on why storms rarely, if ever, form between 5 deg North and 5 deg South latitudes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2018/06/28/why-hurricanes-almost-never-form-near-or-cross-the-equator/ So that all being said, some sailors find it’s a good idea to sail a course not too far off the equator. This way you can head closer to the equator to get yourself out of trouble should big weather develop.

This pretty much brings you up to date on our life in Panama…but wasn’t there something else I was going to say? Right! I was going to mention the reason why we will need to bring Morning Star back to this marina around December 1^st! We are flying to Canada to celebrate Christmas! We had fully planned on spending Christmas here on the boat until Jason’s parents generously offered to pay our flights back to Winnipeg for the month of December! Alex will be getting off ship on Christmas Eve to fly to Winnipeg so we are excited for this change in plans for us all to be together. The original plan had us spending our very first Christmas ever without Alex which was starting to make me really sad. Thank you so much for the plane tickets, Bob and Val! 💗

We are thrilled to be able to spend time with loved ones soon, some who we have not seen in a very long time. I am also looking forward to escaping this heat to enjoy some crisp, frosty, dry, winter Winnipeg air for awhile!

The blog below talks about why we have decided to add the above Coffee button. 😊

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