Thursday 4th February, 2010

We are now in Shelter Bay Marina having sailed from Porvenir in the San Blas.  We dropped Jonathan's sister and brother-in-law, Janice and Tony Vining, off to catch a flight from the extreamly small airport with the shortest runway we have ever seen to fly to Panama and onwards towards the UK, these airstips were built during the secound worl war to protect the coast.  We set off for Shelter Bay at 6.30 am, caught a 5lb Tuna on the way and arrived here at 4p.m.  No berth, for us a very busy, small, marina with everybody waiting besides the BWR to be measured before being allowed to go throught the Panama Canal. It is a bit chaotic, latin spanish, we are at anchor near the pontoons and have been promised one tomorrow, we did persuade them we needed to fill up with water urgently so they moved one yacht for an hour so that we could., at least I can get ten days worth of laundry done. It will be better when we can scrub the decks of all the salt and polish the stainless steel as that hasn't been done since we left Bonaire so it is all looking rather tired and dirty. 

We seem to have been very lucky with our crossing to the San Blas as many of the other yachts who did not go to Cartagena but straight from Curacoe hit very heavy seas and winds of 40 plus causing quite a lot of damage to some of them, not many of them were able to visit the southern section of the San Blas which is ashame as it is less touristy therefore more original and interesting, we only came across a couple of other yachts.  Supper ashore tonight at the Marina very busy full of yachties.