Panama and beyond

Dr Roger Geary recounts a canal transit undertaken in 2018

- Dr Roger Geary

Overcoming, or ignoring, various medical issues, including cancer scares and, in Liz’s case, major surgery, we decided to return to Panama where we’d left our 37ft Colvic Countess and continue sailing rather than await seemingly never-ending medical tests.

Our return flights were, miraculously, on time, including the connecting flight from Bogota, enabling us to take a taxi to a chandlery in Panama City where, equally miraculously, the stuff I’d pre-ordered from the United States – antifoul, deck paint and automatic fire extinguisher – was waiting for us. By mid-afternoon we’d made the 90-minute taxi journey across the width of Panama and arrived back at our base in Shelter Bay Marina, on the Caribbean side, deep in the jungle.

We’d booked a room in the marina’s hotel for the first few days while the boat was still out of the water as living on the hard with no water, no air conditioning and high humidity is no joke. This turned out to be a wise move, as American friends who had opted to live on board their boat on the hard had woken up to find a large puma in the cockpit on more than one occasion.

We collapsed into bed and tried to recover from the bus, flights and taxi journeys. By 0730 the next day we’d had breakfast, the marina workers had moved the boat from the secure yard to a place where we could antifoul and so we commenced work.

Scraping barnacles