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Log
of S/V High Drama
No.5- Panama Canal
The Caribbean trade winds regularly spill across the
Continental Divide through the Gaillard Cut in the Panama
Canal and down over the Bridge of the Americas onto High
Drama. The winds bring warm dry air and blow at 12-16
knots all day and all night. The nighttime low temperature
drops a few degrees lower at night, so a sheet or T shirt
is needed when sleeping on deck. It is the summer dry season
Panama, and even the tourists can tell.
This episode of the adventures of S/V High
Drama covers High Drama’s haul out at the Vacamonte
shrimp boat repair yard, visits by family, and a transit
of the Panama Canal aboard S/V Grace.
This log finds the High Drama crew making final preparation
to set off to Ecuador, and then the land of Darwin, the Galapagos,
and then further west. We now have several email addresses
and we very much enjoy hearing from you, as long as you
don’t send our message back to us. The addresses are at
the end of this epistle. If this Log is garbled beyond the
usual lousy syntax of the author, or if you fail to see the
pictures, you may look for it at http://members.aol.com/Brookehighdrama,
where our son Jason graciously promised to put it.
Refit of High Drama
We have been engaged in preparing High Drama for offshore
sailing since we since we decided last August to sail to the
Galapagos. The term “we” must be used quite loosely
because in a stroke of extreme good fortune we met Scott and
Sharon aboard S/V Geisha. Scott started tearing
down engines at age 9 and first met Sharon when her engine
blew up. His technical college instructor assigned Scott to
rebuild Sharon’s engine. She became more interested in machines
as well as mechanics and became a prototype machinist. Scott
put in 8 years in a Chevy dealership and 9 in at Chrysler.
He has been to most of the schools those two manufacturers
offer. He has the keenest eye for potential problems that
I have ever seen. What started out as some discrete assignments
grew into a major refit. Many of the repairs and upgrades
we paid so dearly for in San Diego were done again. Scott
explained things as he went along and showed me how our new
exhaust muffler was just loose on the bilge floor, banging
into a seacock when we hit a big wave. When our new teak deck
was installed, the backing plates on the cleats on the
foredeck were left off. The windlass motor should have
been rotated so that when the anchor chain came aboard it
did not make contact with the electric motor, nor splash sea
water on it. The list of “do overs” is long. Plus, there were
some upgrades that we wanted. We replaced our plumbing and
installed new wind instruments and a depth sounder. We even
put in an electronic fishfinder with the hopes that it will
give us a better picture of the bottom as we approach
reefs in the South Pacific.
High Drama on the hard
at Vaccamonte.
Ann taping.
A neighbor.
Some work necessitated that we haul out. We hauled High Drama
out of the water at a repair yard that caters to shrimp boats,
not yachts. The owner and chief engineer went to Georgia
Tech for an undergraduate and masters degree. High Drama
was lifted out of the water by a Synchrolift that handles large
shrimpers. The yard workers were very professional, but the
facilities presented quite humble amenities. We continued
to live on the boat in the yard and learned that the millions
of “moscas” or flies also called the repair yard home. Living
conditions fell somewhat short of sanitary and Ann picked up
a serious and nasty case of the touristas that hung on for 10
days.
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The boat yard was next to a fish processing
plant and small commercial area. Although Ann and I had
been exposed to some strong smells from a meat packing plant
in our home town, Albert Lea, Minnesota, we were ill prepared
for the smell of fish guts when the wind shifted. The small
commercial area included a bank, a restaurant, and a bar.
I recalled the days of my youth when I worked construction
and my colleagues would consume 4 or 5 Grain Belt “steaks”
for lunch. The restaurant and bar were company stores and
as far as I could tell, they presented no bargains. Although
there were a few women who worked in the fish processing
plant or in the offices, the boat yard was a male dominated
environment. Boat yard workers verbally expressed their
delight at seeing female yachties walking through their
turf. After the first day the workers all returned
our “Buenas dias! Como esta?” with a smile and a “Bien,
gracious.” Several workers adopted us and told us
we need not be concerned about the workers in the yard,
but that we should watch out for the men who hung around
the wharf. The workers uniformly advised that we should
never leave our boat unattended at night, and never leave
tools out in plain sight. These men had little exposure
to English . Our modest success communicating in Spanish
prompted me to recall the thousands of depositions I sat
through watching lawyers play on the subtleties of language
and feign lack of understanding in an effort to get a more
favorable response from a witness. When both sides to the
conversation are trying to communicate, the process can
produce some fascinating results.
High Drama lost some of her dignity hauled out. She
looked like a proper lady with her skirt hiked up uncomfortably
high. She got a new coat of bottom paint, through hulls
for seacoks that had weathered and frozen, and through hull
fittings for the new depth sounder and fish finder. The
work all proceeded swiftly because we brought the parts,
paint and other supplies with us. Thanks go to Scott on
that score.
Holiday Visits
We were pleased
to have family visitors in the last month. My brother Tom
and his lady friend Sam visited us in late November. Despite
pronouncements from internationally renowned weather sources,
the long awaited “dry “ season had not yet arrived.
The weather was hot muggy and rainy for a week. We sailed
from Panama City to Isla Contadora. (You may recall that
the Shah of Iran lived out his years on Contadora after
the Ayatollah deposed him.) Now Tom had already told me
that he had never caught a big fish, which he defined as
one larger than a bullhead from Fountain Lake in Albert
Lea. Indeed, he claimed he jinxed boats by his mere presence.
While I thought this was overstatement, he proved that it
was true. He hooked several big fish, however, crevalle
jacks weighing about 40 pounds. They were fun to catch on
our new rod and reel, but he was very disappointed to learn
that the meat is a dark red and very bitter, and not fit
to eat. We released five fish. He did set a personal record
for size, however. Returning to Balboa from Contadora he
hooked the only other fish in this area that tastes lousy,
Mexican jacks. So much for Tom’s fishing. On the only sunny
day we had we snorkled all afternoon at a small island surrounded
by bright sand and a modest coral reef.
We did enjoy several
meals ashore with Tom and Sam. Sam speaks excellent Spanish
and convinced the waiters to deviate from the menu. I am
not sure what we ate, but it was delicious! On a trip around
Contadora in golf carts Tom and Sam noticed that mine had
some difficulty going uphill. While they thought it fun
to attribute the poor performance to the large load, the
machine performed no better when we switched. We visited
all of the beaches on the island and were disappointed that
Panama’s only lawful nude beach, highly touted in our guide
book, was a garbage dump.
Now when my mother
Lois and son Jason visited, we caught good eating fish.
Lois and Jason arrived at midnight and at about 5:00 AM
the next morning we sailed again for the Perlas Islands.
Lois slept in and when she got up we already had a nice
sierra which was in the process of becoming ceviche and
we had filets for several meals. We traveled further than
the inhabited island of Contadora to an uninhabited island
named San Jose. The dry season had begun and we experienced
sunny days and trade winds out of the north. Lois had expressed
some apprehension about traveling to Panama in the first
place. Fortunately, Jason had a few days off and could travel
with her between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
The surf in San
Jose was not huge, but we still had exciting dinghy landings.
Lois popped out of the dinghy with the agility of a 40 year
old when we hit the beach. All those years of swimming,
walking, golf, and bran have paid dividends for her as she
approaches her 87th year. While we were not able to show
Tom and Sam much of the cruising life, we introduced Lois
and Jason to it by staying four days bumming around beaches
where we and the boats we with whom we cruised were the
only boats around.
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