Five Islands - Isla Grande for Valentines Day Lunch

Isla Grande for Valentines Day Lunch

Five Islands

John & Sue

Tue 19 Feb 2013 17:30

It's been a couple of weeks since our last post and life has been very quiet if not a bit boring. We are still waiting for the batteries and gearbox repair kit to arrive from the States. These should be here this week, but everything runs on 'Panama time'. We finally cornered Guido (our German mechanic friend) to remove the gearbox. The shaft is being held in place by the anode up against the strut on the outside and strong twine on the inside. Getting Guido to repair and re-install the gearbox is going to be our greatest challenge. That part could take awhile.

Part of keeping ourselves occupied has been following other boat blogs, including a family we met in Shelter Bay. Paul, Laura & their 3 kids, Ellie, Claire & Adam, who bought a 37 TPI Jeanneau Lagoon (the same as ours) 5 months ago and have taken 12 months off work to 'go sailing'. These guys have travelled from Bocus Del Toro along the Panama coast up to San Blas and are now on their way to the Bahamas, via Providencia, Guanaja (Honduras) and are now in Roatan (Bay Islands of Honduras). They are not sailers (like us) and along with the amazing times have had a couple of scary ones as well, mainly the prop shaft coming loose and dislodging itself through the hull until it struck the rudder. It let water in until they could plug it and then Paul & Laura had to go overboard and hammer the shaft back in place. This took place about 2 hours out to sea from the San Blas on their way to Providencia. Then they had a tug type boat follow them for over an hour off the Honduras coast. It finally made radio contact and left them alone to continue their journey. Their 'buddy boat' had had problems with their main sail and had left them behind due their increased speed under spinnaker. We have been reading, watching a series called 'Deadwood' on DVD, I've doing cross stitch and generally just lazing around.

We had images of 'Ken' the Rat revisited about 2 weeks ago. We had bought bananas and pineapples from the travelling veggie man onshore and placed the fruit in the fruit bowl on the galley bench. The next morning one of the bananas had been gnawed at one end. We both looked at each other and said "Surely not another Ken". I hadn't noticed any tell tale signs (rat/mice poo) but we had no idea what could eat such a large chunk of a banana and we didn't know of it's existence if it was living on aboard. We have a couple of resident Gecko's but we doubted they would eat that much banana. The next night the same thing happened to another banana. We then went into high alert mode and took turns the following night creeping up the stairs and shining a light on the bowl to see if we could identify the culprit. It was about 2am when i went to check and as i was climbing the stairs something large and silvery flew past me. I initially thought it was a very large moth. Then i saw the culprit flitting in and out of the saloon door. A BAT not a Rat. We were stunned and amazed to think this creature could smell a ripe banana from the shore and was now flying in and out of our boat as if it owned it. The solution to the problem was easy to rectify - close the door and put the fruit in the fridge. End of problem.

The weather up until a couple of days ago has a been gorgeous and we ventured out in the dinghy on Valentines Day up to Isla Grande, about 15mins further along the coast from the anchorage. We pulled into a little restaurant and ran into John & Marcy from S/V Honu Kai (Turtle Sea) where we had a lovely lunch. We then walked to the eastern point of the Island. The Island is a major tourist spot for Panamanians and as a result it is kept clean, freshly painted in bright colours and the locals are friendly and have a sense of 'customer service', which generally is lacking in the rest of the Panamanian population. It also attracts the backpackers and we met a French guy who was practicing his tight rope walking and his American friend who was playing a plastic PVC pipe didgeridoo. These guys had just swum from the mainland to the island (about 1km) on small tubes and had set up camp in one of the shelters on the beach (and we think we are adventurous). The James Bond film 'Quantum of Solace' had scenes filmed on an island between the anchorage and Isla Grande as well as Shelter Bay.