Being in Flamenco Marina is another one of those things you put down to experience.  There is a terrific swell, it is pretty windy, very hot and we are all rafted up along a floating pontoon four yachts deep - if it wasn’t for the damage being done to our lines it would be an amusing spectacle to see 17 yachts all shooting backwards and forwards on their springs in a random demented fashion.  We have a four meter tide here too and an awful lot of rubbish gets trapped in the water inside the marina. However it is safe, we have great company all around us and the restaurants are superb and well priced.

I have to say at this point, three months into the Rally, that nothing has been too much trouble for the Blue Water Rally team – namely Tony and his wife Christine (who is an active volunteer!), Peter and Annette and Richard.  Time and time again they go way past the call of duty to help us all – driving us to sail makers, chart shops, cash points, supermarkets, chandlers – in fact anywhere we want to go.  They have organised evening get togethers not mentioned in the small print with beautiful Panamanian dancers – their dresses are intricate, take two years to make and are handed down through families as heirlooms -

Beautiful dancer in her traditional dress

- carted out numerous spares from England, posted our mail back in the UK and have all generally offered a wonderful support system…… not to mention being the catalyst for so much friendship and joy!

We have literally shopped until we have dropped  at the Multi Plaza in Panama City where they will deliver the goods to the boats…. You don’t have to be Einstein to work out how many beers (50 cents a can) you need on board if you are three up and are going to be at anchor for 60 days without access to a shop!  The malls here are pretty sophisticated with shops ranging from Mont Blanc to Zara and Timberland - Jennie and I enjoyed a lovely Sushi lunch today.  The prices are generally very low here in Panama – for instance a decent two litre box of table wine is 3 US Dollars; a packet of Gillette Mach3 Turbo razor blades 7.28 US Dollars.

Two days ago Tony and Richard ferried us all to the Gamboa Rainforest ‘Park’ which was a lot of fun.  Great buffet lunch served on a deck over a lake.

Gamboa Park lunch

It sounds terribly blasé I know but we have seen a few jungles now and certainly by the end of the day after our ‘Canopy Tour’ we were feeling a bit ‘leafed out’!  We saw a lot of termite nests in trees, all sorts of medicinal plants (would you stake your life on any of them though?) a distant capuchin monkey, a few ants, an authentic indigenous reconstructed village – and a real Indian selling her wares - you know the sort of thing – but the point is if you haven’t done it all before it’s a relatively safe way of doing it. We all hoiked up to the viewing platform at the summit of the chair lift where the view was terrific and we could see some of the canal we had traversed two days previously (did you know that the Chagres river is the only one in the world to flow into two oceans – Atlantic and Pacific?) and later trooped around the reptile house, the butterfly dome, the orchid garden and the fish aquarium.  We were all worried we would miss the four o’clock Howler monkey tour –which in the event we did - but we were reimbursed our money and frankly it was a blessed relief!!  We had had a good day together and a lot of laughs but one of those days bordering on hysteria.

Pointy ant nest in a tree

View from the cable car

The boys trooping up to the viewing platform

At the top!

Ship going down the canal we had traversed

Indigenous Indian island

Two days to go before we’re off again – the Marina tried to pull a fast one today and billed the first two to leave for 8 days each instead of the number of days they had individually stayed.  They picked the wrong men though – our nesting partner Reinhart off Blue Raven and Brian a tough Aussie off Our Island!  Brian’s yacht was lashed up to the fuel dock and he refused to move it – a frustrated queue began to form and enough said that the Mexican standoff did not last long; the marina capitulated! 

We will write soon from Las Perlas Islands……….