09:22,50 N

79:57,00 W

Safiya in Shelter Bay Marina

Well here we are in Shelter Bay Marina awaiting our canal crossing which is scheduled for Thursday.

The Marina is really a holding area for boats waiting to go through the canal and is surrounded by rainforest. There is absolutely nothing outside of it apart from jungle!

The closest civilisation is the town of Colon, about an hour by taxi and involves crossing the canal by ferry. So there's no popping out to the shops from here!

To avoid going stir crazy stuck here for 10 days we decided to go into Panama City for a couple of days for a change of scenery.

We booked into one of the sky scraper hotels which adorn the skyline of Panama City and enjoyed the delights of 21st century. It really is a 24/7 city - very busy and noisy and quite a contrast to the remore islands of San Blas where we've spent the last few weeks.

Its a shoppers paradise with several huge US style shopping malls which I managed to drag Harvey round, and also a large chandlery that Harvey dragged me around!

We had a very pleasant day wandering around El Casco Viejo, the old quarter which is like a smaller scale Cartahena with its beautifully restored colonial buildings.

On Thursday we had the Oyster "Carnival" party held in the ruins of Fort San Lorenzo which is another of the Spanish built fortifications which are prevalent on this coast line.

We all dressed up in our Carnival finery and enjoyed local entertainment as well as excellent food and wine, see picture below. We also invited our new friend Antonio from Portobello to the party (see previous blog).

We had a very thorough briefing from Oyster about our trip through the canal. As there are 28 boats in the fleet we are going through in three groups. The smaller boats are scheduled to leave on Tuesday and the transit takes two days. Canal regulations dictate that each boat has at least 5 crew, one to drive and 4 line handlers. As many of the smaller boats don't have enough crew a lot of people are doubling up. We have our friends Andy and Maggie Telford coming out to join us, arriving later today so will have enough crew and Harvey, Andy and Declan are all going on the first transit to help other boats.

To go through the locks we form "nests" of three boats of similar size rafted together, once we're through the first lock we separate and spend the night anchored in Gatun Lake. Swimming in the lake is not recommended due to the crocodiles that live there!