Sadly, the Boquete lesson of Booking A Hotel In Advance was lost on us and by the time we got to the beach towns west of Panama City, it was late and we needed a hotel. And it was Saturday. Once again, we spent over an hour driving around from hotel to hotel, banging on gates and waking up night clerks to discover repeatedly that everything was full and no, they didn’t know where we might find a room. By the time we headed into San Carlos, we were all sufficiently tired and cranky that the shabby-looking hotel over a Chinese restaurant on the main road looked downright inviting.

After inquiring at the restaurant, we were sent down an alley/parking lot to the back of the building where there was a very dilapidated yet happening bar raging behind some scrappy partitions among other things, such as our hotel entry, and we banged on the large metal gate until a intensely bored-looking girl let us in. Yes she had rooms and they were every bit as unspectacular as we had expected with peeling paint of sickening colors on the walls and geriatric air conditioners that drained via once-transparent tubing back into the shower of each room where it had stained a brown cascade down the wall. However, after a cursory glance over for cockroaches, we shrugged and checked in.

The stress and irritation of trying to find a hotel at 11pm lifted from our shoulders, we were suddenly feeling like we needed a beer. From the hotel, we peeked through the crack between a cinder block wall and the corrugated tin roofing at the mayhem below; people were shouting and laughing and there was much shuffling and music down there. There was also an occasional rooster crow and this is because the place was actually a Gallera, a cock fighting bar. We asked the hotel lady what kind of scene it was—would it be tranquilo for three gringos and some Panama City boy to just waltz in, get a beer, and check out the chickens? She shrugged to let us know she really couldn’t care less where we got a beer and we headed down, figuring we could always just leave if we didn’t get bodily thrown out first.

A quick assessment of the interior of the gallera confirmed that there were in fact females present in the bar—if only one or two of them—and we strode (cough) confidently inside. If there was no cliché silence as people stopped what they were doing to stare at us, it was only because a fight was going on in the basement arena and the reggaeton was at top volume. We walked through a large room with tables, chairs, a pool table, chicken cages, and various cock-fighting accoutrements to a smaller stuffy room where the actual beer was kept. We casually lined up at the far end of the bar and ordered beers before tentatively looking around. We were being stared at in a huge way but from what we could tell without making eye contact (disastrous!), it was more of a curious what-the-hell stare rather than a you-are-SO-chicken-feed stare. Tito and Joshua wandered over to the patterned cinderblock wall so they could peek down to where the current cockfight was underway and immediately an insanely drunk guy sidled up to Rachel to propose marriage.

The drunk guy’s name was Flavio and he introduced himself to the four of us and then to Rachel and myself once more; with a drunken flick of his wrist and slight stagger, he ordered a round of beers for us all even though it was evident that we had barely dented the ones we just ordered ourselves and he was holding a full beer himself. The female waitress (there were in fact three of them and we weren’t feeling quite so awkward now) lined five open Balboas on the bar as Flavio continued to attempt communication with Rachel (“Beautiful,” he said, “Panamá!” “Um…” said Rachel); she shrugged and gave us a little sympathetic smile.

[Cock-weighing chute.]

We carried all the beers out to one of the tables and sat down. Flavio seized this opportunity to introduce himself again to the four of us and we were shortly joined by another very drunk guy in a red shirt. He immediately ordered another round of beers and started telling Joshua some story, of which Joshua was able to follow very little even though he put on a good show of ‘si’s and ‘verdad’s. I made the mistake of making eye contact with the group of guys sitting at the table next to ours when I was surveying the room. Immediately they started to talk to me: “Hi, where are you from, what are you doing here, where are you staying, you are very beautiful, etc.”, all of which I initially started answering but when it looked like I might get yet another beer out of the deal, I told them I didn’t speak Spanish. Flavio was sitting between Joshua and Tito and nudging him, “Presenteme a sus mujeres!” (present me to the women!) and once again, Tito explained the connections: wife, cousin, and cousin’s wife. Flavio extended his hand, “Beautiful. Panamá!”

Tiring of all the attention and constant introductions, Rachel decided to make things more interesting and morphed into her drunken-situation alter-ego, “Susan from Canada” and introduced herself thusly to all subsequent drunks who began gathering around our table. The cockfight had just ended with a loud roar/cheer and a shocking number of men poured out of the basement arena. A guy named Manuel joined our table who was actually somewhat lucid; he sat down and ordered another round of drinks even though roughly two-thirds of the bottles still hadn’t been touched and within minutes there was a daunting array of Balboas vying for space on the table.

The scene was indeed strange but it was clear that although we were very much a spectacle rivaling the cockfight itself, we were not unwelcome in the least. The waitress rolled her eyes as each new guy who joined us ordered a new round. The red shirted guy had finally released Joshua from his slurred conversation and started in on Rachel/Susan and me. Except that every time I looked at him he’d stop whatever he was saying and make some gestures and comments about how our eyes were blue like the sky and some other stuff so I pretty much had to totally ignore him to keep him on track with whatever it was he was talking about. Not that it really made any difference because I couldn’t hear much of anything he said around all those beer bottles.

After the fight, money was changing hands and the cock handlers (or whatever) started getting their roosters out to prepare for the next fight. The roosters themselves seemed average enough, they were not especially large but they were plucked in an odd way: all the feathers were plucked from the legs and chest and possibly the around the long tail feathers so that the tails hung in a particularly prominent arc. The handlers held them fast around the middle and in this manner the roosters stayed very calm even while they were being passed around among different people, being weighed in the cock-scale, and fitted with fighting spikes. The spike fitter occupied the table next to ours. A fresh rooster was brought to him and from a jar of different sized curved spikes attached to the ends of little cones, he searched until he found a cone the right size to fit over the nub above and behind the rooster’s toes. Once he had a pair matched, he began winding surgical tape around the leg above and below the nub. Then he heated the cone at the back of the spike and dipped it in what looked like sealing wax to glue it over the nub; more tape was wrapped around the leg and when finished, the rooster had a pair of two-inch curved metal claws jutting out of the back of his legs.

[Fitting the cock spike.]

A new fight was about to begin and Manuel invited Joshua down to watch; entrance to the arena below for the evening was $2 (down from $5 which is what someone told us when we first arrived) and, overwhelmed with curiosity, Joshua headed downstairs with the majority of the bar. Aside from ourselves and the bar girls, there were only a couple of guys playing pool left; there was a uniformed cop supposedly guarding the rooster cages and he stood in the doorway to the basement so he could watch the action. Flavio excused himself as well but red-shirt stayed upstairs and continued regaling Rachel with exclamations of his appreciation of her exotic blue-eyed gringa beauty.

Another round of beers was ordered the moment the fight finished when Manuel, Flavio, and Joshua returned; Manuel had won his bet and was feeling flush with cash. The waitress looked highly skeptical as she tilted and peeked into one of the many undrunk and sweating beers already on the table; Rachel and I tried to pantomine that no, don’t bring us any more but a few minutes later, she returned with a tray of open Balboas for everyone. Flavio had forgotten who we were and required fresh introductions; Rachel glared at Tito as he introduced her as Rachel and not Susan but the discrepancy went unnoticed.

Again, roosters were paraded around by their owners who held and stroked them from head to tail and the new fighters were weighed and fitted with spikes. By the time the next fight rolled around and the place emptied, Tito wandered over to the doorway to peek in on the scene. Left alone with the dude in the red shirt, the scene quickly degenerated. Red shirt had already told us no less than a thousand times how beautiful our faces and blue eyes were and now he began making a very curious gesture in his lap. “Grande,” he said. Oh brother, we thought; we’re outta here. Then he started explaining to Rachel that he had a friend who spoke beautiful English and it was a shame that he was not here. But sadly, this friend was afflicted with a “hernia muy grande” (again the gesture, which was like hefting a football at the side of his lap). If this wasn’t bizarre enough, he went on to say that even more tragically, this hernia made his English-speaking friend piss himself. At this point, we couldn’t help ourselves and were nearly crying from laughter but Red Shirt assured us that this was a grave situation indeed. We tried to look serious and sympathetic as he repeated a few more times the football-hefting motion, the hernia grande, and the pissing himself part but it was hard to keep a straight face. Finally he cut to the chase and began asking us what our feelings were about Latin men. To make sure we understood, he described what Latin men meant (he, for example, was a Latin man) and we pretty much took that opportunity to split.

Rachel turned to me as we picked two fresh beers out from the pack and said, “You are going to put this on your website aren’t you? And then my family will read it and be scandalized that we took you to a gallera during your stay in Panamá!” “Um…” I said.

The fight had been going on some minutes already and the place was almost empty outside the fighting arena so we wandered over to the doorway to see if we could catch a glimpse—we didn’t want to pay $2 to participate in the serious spectating but after hanging out there for hours, we were curious as to what the hell went on below. The door guards saw us and enthusiastically made space for us so we could see into the arena.

The arena walls were about waist high and the inner circle guys crouched around, hanging over the edges of the walls. People stood behind them and on one side were I think there were some benches to stand up on. People were betting across the arena and the inner circle guys were shouting and gesturing. They made sucking/kissing noises or clapped loudly at the roosters during the fight. I could see Joshua off to one side taking photos (he asked if it was weird if he took photos but Manuel said it was fine—nobody cared). Next to Joshua swayed Flavio who apparently had continued to pester Joshua to be presented to the women. Joshua said that at one point near the beginning of the fight, he had called a bet of 50 pesos ($25) out to the crowd in general. When someone finally took him up on the bet, Flavio pulled out a damp wad of ones and change and when it was clear that he had maybe $10 at most, the guy walked off totally disgusted.

When we entered, there were two roosters in the ring fighting, one light and one dark, and they were flapping around making pecking stabs at one another. Joshua said that almost the moment the handlers let go of them in the ring, they start in at each other without stopping until one finally doesn’t get up. For the most part, the pecking didn’t seem a particularly efficient way of dispatching the other chicken but this was the strategy of choice (and why the fights often lasted so long—it takes a really long time to peck another chicken to death, or at least to the point of exhaustion). Every so often, one rooster would pin the other beneath it and peck some more. I didn’t see it but Joshua said that they do in fact use the spikes in an odd maneuver where they hop at the opponent with claws out, stabbing down with their heels where the spike is affixed. This maneuver is a real crowd pleaser. When not actively pecking, the roosters flare the feathers on the head and neck out and circle each other testily. The lighter rooster clearly had the upper hand and was doing all the pecking and pinning down of the other rooster, who was continually on the defensive and not making any aggressive moves at all. The shouting, clapping, and whistling was getting louder every time the darker chicken was pinned.

Suddenly something strange happened; it was like a light switch was turned: the lighter (offensive) rooster just relaxed his neck feathers and walked away from the darker chicken. The crown went absolutely berserk; the inner ring guys stood up and everyone was moving around and shouting. The two handlers climbed into the ring (there were a lot of people half-climbing into the ring at this point) and seized their roosters. They held them around the middle and pointed them menacingly at each other in the middle of the ring, and let go. Before the handlers even had a chance to climb out of the ring, the lighter rooster again took off in the opposite direction from the darker one and jumped out of the ring. Mayhem! Bets were flying and people were yelling and gesturing wildly. Once more the handlers faced their roosters off in the middle of the ring and once again the lighter rooster wanted none of it. That was the end of the fight. I seriously thought there was going to be a riot. The place exploded and everyone jumped into the ring, the handlers scooped up their roosters (the lighter one was surely destined for chicken soup); the darker rooster had just won by default. Rachel and I got the hell out of the way of the door as the mass of gesticulating drunk cockfight spectators came roaring out of the room below.

By now it was well after 2am and I had seen enough. Joshua and Tito stayed to hang out with Manuel and Flavio and the rest but Rachel and I bade farewell (“Beautiful, said Flavio “Panamá!”) and headed back up to the rooms to crash. The fight we had seen was the last fight for the night and it turned out that Manuel had won the pot for fastest fight of the evening (he had three birds himself). Joshua and Tito reported that Red Shirt had passed out only about five minutes after our departure and sat slumped in his chair the remainder of the evening. Flavio continued to contribute little to the conversation other than “Panamá!” and required a few more introductions. Sober friends of Manuel’s arrived and another tableful of beers were ordered to get them up to speed; Joshua and Tito had to fight to pay for any of them. Joshua didn’t get back until maybe 4:30 or so and the next morning Rachel said that around 3, Tito had come up to the room to use the bathroom but when she asked if he was in for the night, he said, “there are still beers on the table and Joshua is still down there; I have to go back.”

[Manuel’s cock.]

All of us were feeling sort of crappy if not still drunk the next morning but we bravely ate a low-key breakfast before pressing on back to the city. On the way out of town, we passed one of the gallera dudes passed out in the ditch at the side of the road.

Every year, the town of Boquete has a Feria de las Flores y el Café and thus kicks off a season’s worth of non-stop festivals and drunken disco-blaring parties all across Panama. We headed out with the Panamian cousins (Tito and Rachel) on a road trip for the Boquete one.

First order of business on a road trip: snacks. And beer. The road trip snacks of choice were empanadas from the roadside quesa place and something called ‘choripan.’ We had to shun the previous favorite roadside queso place because a recent expose revealed that they carelessly dumped their cheesy byproducts in the stream behind the building and now it was a fetid mess of evil-smelling vileness. They were to be shut down soon if they didn’t shape up. We stopped instead at the rival queso place for the empanadas and then headed on for the choripan. The choripan place had a startlingly disturbing logo.

Choripan came in two styles, Spanish and Argentinean, and were hot doggish in strategy with a piquant sausage lodged in a bun and drizzled with salsa brava if you went Spanish, Chimichurri if you went Argentinean.

We stopped at a different roadside cantina at one point to do a little Panamanian Cantina Bathroom research (verdict: it had possibly never been cleaned since it was constructed, the toilet had clearly not been flushed in a long, long time—no water—and relied on gravity to keep at an appropriate level, there was a collection of dead beetles the size of kumquats in one corner, but by god there was toilet paper—I still used my own). While drinking a beer we chatted for a bit with one of the two guys at the bar. He was fluent in advice for hotel staying, Boquete, and general traveling in the region. “Dangerous road between David and Boquete, you have to be careful,” he told us. “Why, is it curvy?” “No,” and he looked after Tito who had just headed off for the bathroom, “JOVENES!” he whispered. (Youths!) We all glanced suspiciously about us while waiting for Tito. After promising to be careful, we bade farewell.

Any hotel-booking optimism we may have had was quickly and painfully shot down once we arrived in Boquete after dark and hostel after pension after hotelito was either full or absurdly expensive. Or else the door was answered by a jumpy shotgun-weilding parolee type, kids crying in the background, and the room already rented anyway, which you know was really a shame.

In the end we stayed in a nice place and paid a bit more than we had planned but we were happy not to have to drive back down the hill to David. We headed out to the festival, and being used to American-style fairs where the food and booze are always marked up in price by 2000% or so, we were sure to stop by the minisuper for a flask of rum to smuggle inside.

Naturally, we needn’t have bothered since only in the US are captive-audience prices outrageous; food prices were pretty much normal. Food selection was irritatingly homogeneous though: hamburguesas, chicken with yucca, skewers, patacones (fried green plantains, smashed flat), and spirally hot dog things.

Here is a grainy photo of some mafia types actually eating the spiral dogs. Note Whitejacket here looks like he is about to spike his soda with some smuggled-in homebrew.

Here’s a food stall. Note the mouth-watering display of tinned fruit cocktail or whatever. The stall is mostly staffed with no-nonsense food booth types but if you order beer, they defer to the ‘sexy’ beer girl in the skimpy skirt busting out of her metallic halter top who is standing around freezing her ass off (we’re in the mountains where the temperature reaches down to the sixties sometimes). I ordered a beer from one of the no-nonsense types but she sort of waved me off like maybe the bottles in the fridge behind here were only for show, then took about ten seconds getting the attention of the Sexy Beer Chica, who then retrieved one of the bottles and instead of handing it over the counter to me, walked it out to my table (me following behind all confused). Service with a clenched-teeth smile.

The remainder of the flower and coffee fair (night-time) was fairly boring. Mostly it was a lot of people-watching action; the actual flowers were nice but not exotic for someone who comes from a more temperate climate (e.g., large plots of petunias and zinnias). Duran Coffee sponsored the coffee part of the festival and so that was the only variety available and it was dispensed, quaintly, into styrofoam cups from large industrial metal spigot jugs (like in the above photo on the left). As far as the smuggled booze goes, turns out that they sell bottles inside, which was convenient since it took us all of ten minutes to empty the first one.

Here’s us the next morning, still on boat time, we got up at the crack of dawn and spent a few hours wandering around town before Tito and Rachel got out of bed. Note that we are wearing JACKETS. There’s nip in the air, by god.

Here’s a photo of some Panamanian Mountain Butts participating in some vegetable provisioning.

We found a sign indicating a narrow rutted road saying “Vulcan Baru 12 km” so we decided to head there for the day. Along the way we passed coffee plantations and the locals who worked on them. The women wear brightly colored voluminous muumuu-like dresses accented with contrasting wavy ribbon (I forget the name of this stuff).

At the top of the 12-kilometer dirt road was a small booth with a sign that told us that the volcano was in fact an additional 13 kilometers farther and the road situation deteriorated drastically. It also said you had to pay to enter by car or to park if you walked in but since there was nobody around, we parked and walked in for free.

The road was steep and difficult to even walk upon it was so rutted. Up about a kilometer, we could see all the way down to the river delta to the ocean. The sky was intensely blue here and the clouds, bright white.

We headed back down after a small picnic stopping to chat briefly to a gaggle of little kids who mobbed the car with cries of “Galleta! Galleta!” (cookies/crackers!) We drove down to the last tienda we had seen and picked up some galletas, then headed back up to the kids where we dispensed the cookies, some dulce de leche candies we had, and some small sandwiches we made with the remainder of our picnic supplies. Farther down the road, we ran across one more little girl who also wanted galletas but we were cleaned out of food except for a couple of anchovy olives (which we let her have). She tasted it with the tip of her tongue (clearly NOT a galleta) and then looked strangely at us. As we headed on, we saw from the rearview mirror her brother come out and take the olive away from her but he also didn’t know what to think about it.

We got back to town and headed back towards Panama City with the plan of stopping for the night at one of the beach towns. Once again, we arrived well after dark and all hotels were full so we ended up driving all over the place asking here and there to find a place to sleep. It was after 11pm when we finally find a dour little hotel that just happened to be attached to a large cockfighting gallery/bar so once we got settled, we went out to check out the local testosterone [more on this in another post].

Next day we dragged out of the hotel (exhausted and still feeling like we had beer in us after the night before, which we did) to see some beach before heading on to Gorgona, where we visited Tito’s family staying in a beach hotel (which they booked in advance). The hotel scene was centered around a large shallow swimming pool overflowing with children that had about ten-inch visibility. We politely declined a dip.

We got back to Panama City that afternoon with just enough time to get ourselves back to the boat and cleaned up before heading back out to meet Tito and Rachel for Rachel’s going-back-to-work party. Thankfully it was a low-key evening because I think I am actually getting tired of beer.

East or west? We’ve on our way to this point for several months now. We have conveniently avoided making any concrete plans but now that we are at the canal, the Big Decisions must be made. There are many options, naturally.

A. Go on to Ecuador. Everyone here says that Ecuador is where the pot of gold lies. Armed with a pair of rubber boots, Ecuador is rife with possibility. We could just go down for the season and head back to Panama later on; this would set us back another year for the Caribbean, however.

B. Go on to Ecuador and then keep going across the South Pacific! Galapagos, atolls, Fiji, scurvy… My god the mind boggles. Sadly, I’m just not feeling terribly excited about thirty bleedin’ days at sea. All at one time and more than once. (Cheyenne = pansy.) Reading Jack London’s ‘South Sea Tales’ didn’t help, what with those stories about hurricanes hitting atolls with no more than six feet of elevation. Climb a coconut tree.

C. Stay in Panama! Panama is great and there are lots of uninhabited islands to gunk around. But. No.

D. Cross the Canal. Now we’re getting somewhere. Sorta expensive and a hassle though. Payoff better be good.

E. Cross the Canal then do a bit of cruising possibly in the keys off Honduras or San Blas before making all speed for the Mediterranean! Hmmm, that’s interesting. But what route should we take?

F. Panama – Providencia Island (Colombian) –Roatan – Yucatan – Not Cuba Because It’s Illegal – Not Florida In Case We Had To Stop In Cuba For Some Sort of Emergency And We Are Now Fugitives From The Law – Bahamas – Bermuda – Azores – Lisbon, Portugal – Some Other Places – BARCELONA, Spain.

G. Put the boat on a boat and beam it direct to Someplace, Europe. Like on deck of a cargo ship or on a container ship. We’re checking into it but helpful people in the shipping industry are mighty elusive down Panama way. (Is this cheating?)

H. Sell it and buy a boat I can actually stand up in. (I’m just kidding.)
(Sort of.)

Anyway, minds are changing almost daily and as it is, we’re leaning for the canal crossing since nobody will get back to us with any concrete information about shipping a container. We have to get a larger motor in order to get through the canal; our 6hp can push us at 4.5-5 knots but only in perfect conditions and the prop does not stick down into the water far enough; we would be able to go upwards of 8 knots probably if we had the 9.8hp (plus, it has a longer shaft). It seems stupid to get a motor just to cross the canal but having one that actually buried the prop in the water behind us would be a huge improvement; also, the 9.8hp has a charger attachment and functional remote controls to the [center] cockpit so a single person could potentially drive the boat without having to run back and forth to adjust gears or the throttle (what luxury!).

The only thing I worry about is having it take forever to extract our motor from Panamanian customs. If this happens, maybe we’ll take a side trip down to the Darien to decompress while waiting.

Or go to Ecuador.

Playa Maria, Isla Coiba, Panama.

[A particularly accessible stand of mangroves at low tide on Coiba.]

Since leaving Coiba, we have been pretty much on the go, with only one or two stops where we tarried a whole day, going ashore, fretting over how few onions we had left and whether or not we would get scurvy because of it.

[No wind.]

Interestingly, the run between Coiba and Isla Cebago had more sea snakes than we’ve ever seen previously. We passed easily fifteen of them; on a couple of occasions we sailed right over the top of them and then they came out the back of the boat from between the main hull and ama looking really startled, flailing their tail in an effort to flee. Ahhh! Monsters! Not always did they choose the right direction however, and one snake went charging off right into the fishing lure we were dragging behind us, bonking into the lure as it went past, which of course freaked him out all over again. Sea snakes are very cool actually; I find it easy to harbor generous feelings towards the guys when I am not in the water with them.

Wind has been highly sporadic our entire trip through western Panama, either there has been no wind whatsoever or else it has blown from exactly where we are headed. Also, we started getting northern squalls every day at around 4pm; invariably we would be headed east, then happily turn north into an anchorage when BAM, blast of north wind, rain, chop, poor visibility, and we’d have to tack back and forth for the last two or three miles in the failing light. Of course the moment we arrive into the anchorage, the wind would die and shift around to the west or something. Whatever. For our trip from Ensenada Naranjo over to Bucaro, we had zero wind whatsoever and an unbelievably uncomfortable confused chop until 4pm, when we came around Punta Guanico and it shifted to very strong out of the north (no accompanying squall though), which was exactly where we were trying to go at that point and had us wondering if we would make it before dark after all. The wind continued to blow strongly from the northeast the next day and we spent the day tacking back and forth across the bay over to Benao, the kick-off point for heading around Punta Mala and a very lovely anchorage with a beach full of cool seedpods and assorted plastic flotsam. The plan was to pull anchor by 4am the next morning for the haul around Punta Mala and into the Gulf of Panama.

Punta Mala has been the source of much discussion lately as well as extreme consternation on my part; it’s one of those points that everyone remembers distinctly going around. Point Bad. The issues are that there is a very strong current running south along the western side of the gulf (and we want to go north when we round the point), wind usually always blowing strongly from the north, which creates ugly seas (man, two strikes against our sailing direction), a geographic land sticky-outy thrust out in all this almost always works to intensify any wind/sea anomalies, and finally there are no decent anchorages on the other side for like 70 miles. So, once you make the point, you have many miles to go before you sleep, many bone-rattling, ass-numbing, and stomach-squashing miles at that. From what we hear, most people get around the point and just crank the motor, bashing straight north into it until they get far enough away from the point that conditions mellow out a little and they feel comfortable sailing again (supposedly this happens after 30 miles). We have read that if you do actually sail, you are probably better off heading directly for Islas Perlas, a clump of islands way out in the middle of the gulf 70 miles northeast of the point. Since our outboard prop sticks down in the water all of six inches, it was assumed that there would be no way we could motor even if we wanted to and so we figured we’d head directly for the Perlas (unless a miraculous east-northeast wind appeared and we could sail directly up the coast towards Panama City). To help counteract the prevailing current at the point, general advice says to round it on an incoming tide (which slows the current—it does not reverse it). All weather reports lately have said 10-15 knots per hour in the Bay of Panama. Except the last couple of days it had been 20-25.

So we awoke at 3am on Punta Mala Day when the boat started vibrating from some fresh northerly wind. We sort of half slept until the alarm went off at 4am and decided that it was just blowing way too hard; we’d hang out for the day and try to listen to the weather. Don, the SSB weather guy, said that if Benao was blowing 20, don’t even bother making the run around Punta Mala (it was blowing solid 15 with gusts to 20 at daybreak). Rains, on the other hand, says that the wind in Benao has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on at Punta Mala. What to do? We stayed another day doing random projects; I made myself a butterfly net. Boats were starting to stack up: Finisterre and Serenity were anchored with us and Claire de Lune and Icarian were on the way. We decided to try again the next morning and set the alarm for 4:30am; Serenity also was going to go for it. Again, the wind began blasting early; this time perhaps worse than the day before. We hemmed and hawed and stayed put but Serenity took off; we heard them later on the net saying that the winds were 25 knots at Punta Mala. Despite weather reports that this day was supposed to be milder than the previous, we had solid 20 with gusts to 25 in the anchorage. We were glad we didn’t leave.

Because of the tidal timing, we couldn’t just leave anytime—we had to time the point at low incoming tide, plus give ourselves two to three hours to get to the point from the anchorage. We had two tides per day—the early morning one and an afternoon tide, which would put us at the point around 5:30-6pm, a time when the wind had actually decreased in intensity the past two days. We decided that if the wind mellowed out a little by 2 or 3pm, we’d take off and make a night run around the point. It did mellow out and after fixing the motor yet again, we pulled anchor and rounded the corner out of Benao at 3:30pm.

The sail to the point was a straight shot close-hauled with winds gusting down over the land. We made really good time and were at the point in about two hours, where the wind had mellowed to about ten knots and the seas appeared surprisingly calm. We passed the point while I made Spanish tortilla for dinner. Seas and wind were still totally mellow and we were feeling like Mala was in the bag. Once we got around the point we found the current to be as strong as promised and it was pushing us around 30 to 40 degrees from what our boat was pointed; we decided to definitely go for the Perlas and put as much distance between us and the point as fast as possible. We put a VHF call to Finisterre back in Benao to brag over our genius timing for the Dread Punta Mala.

One hour and a half later, a mere five miles northeast of the point, the wind picked up. Like, a stiff 15-20, not altogether horrid but that’s also when the seas turned to shit. Just ugly, tossing, churning seas. Wind waves and swells and watery pointy monsters swashing in from all directions. The boat was suddenly very, very uncomfortable and I promptly got seasick. By that point it was dark and that just-gaze-at-the-horizon (longingly) thing works about as well as snake oil so I wedged myself in the bunk and gazed fixedly at Joshua at the helm instead.

One other detail of note: we were in fact rounding the point to enter the Gulf of Panama, where every single ship entering or exiting the Panama Canal on the Pacific side passes and so the first twenty or so miles was like a fun game of nighttime Frogger with all the freighter traffic. At one point, Joshua brightly informed me that we were dodging no fewer than six different freighters going in both directions.

Within an hour, we were double-reefed and the storm jib had replaced the working jib. We were still making twenty to thirty degrees off our course with the current and were only around eight miles from the point. The seas were getting really big and the wind had increased to 25 knots. We were making crap time too, maybe only 2.5 to 3 knots, because the walls of water knocking up against our bow and amas were efficient in halting forward progress. Joshua was still at the helm getting splashed with water every time a wave bounced up against the ama and I was still wedged in the bunk, that is, when I wasn’t having to get up to pee, which, curiously, happens with alarming frequency when I get seasick and nervous. Making the journey to the head when one is already feeling crappy is an exercise in misery and after four or five trips in quick succession, I spent all of my non-head-journeying time lying in the bunk worrying about when I would have to do it again. By morning I was so dehydrated I could hardly think straight.

Around three in the morning, the conditions peaked at around 30 knots of wind and snarly shite-fer-seas and Joshua figured out how to heave-to. This means you backwind one sail against the other and so it counters… and um turn the rudder over so that it, erm, the boat points into the sea and wind, mostly, and sort of takes care of itself. Something like that. Anyway, it worked pretty well; the boat really felt and sounded like it was taking a beating and now the motion through the water was better—more rolly and less jarring. Hove-to, we were actually making time in the right direction!

We were thirty miles out from the point by sunrise the next morning—this is supposedly when the current and wind effects from the point should dissipate. From what I could tell though, not much had changed. Winds were still around 20 knots and the seas still nasty. Neither of us had slept at all. Now that something that could be humorlessly construed as a horizon was visible, sometimes, I took over the helm/Frogger and Joshua passed out in the bunk, which was wet from salt water that had splashed onto the cabin and leaked in from the window (jeez!). The alarming motion of the boat was lessened by the fact that I was getting numb to it somewhat (Joshua assured me that we were not going to capsize and so I got to toss that worry to the bloody gale).

The wind and seas didn’t calm down for another 30 miles actually; that is, 60 miles beyond Punta Mala. I was driving along and suddenly there were all these large trees in the water. I dodged them for about 100 feet or so and then suddenly the boat shot out into smooth, regular water. (“Smooth” being used highly relative here.) No more random large mountainous waves knocking us sideways, just straightforward 17-hour gale-fed wind chop with 60 miles of fetch. Aaaahhhhh. It was 1:30pm. After a while Joshua woke up and took over steering some more and I actually managed to fall asleep for the first time. When I woke up, the working jib was back up and Joshua had the boat tuned so that it was sailing itself.

We arrived at Isla San Jose just after the sun set and headed up into the wide open Playa Grande to anchor. It was New Years Eve and we just happened to have a bottle of Sparkling Italian Muscat-esque wine on hand. Joshua rigged this up with a sock soaked in rubbing alcohol (we were going through an experimental phase with stove fuel in El Salvador and this was a reject we didn’t know what to do with) in an effort to cool it off. We made actual cooked food for the first time in twenty-four hours and passed out by 8pm, our champagne sock refrigeration system forgotten and dangling in the rigging.