Position 09:33.35N 78.56.88W

We arrived this morning at 9.30am, we converged on Jackamy in the early hours of this morning and came into the anchorage together which was great.

There were lots of rally boats here so a lovely welcome from everyone and lots of stories to swap about our horrendous trip !

Three boats had their self steering gear bent by the impact of the waves and had to hand steer, another boat had three knockdowns, many experienced winds in excess of 55 miles per hour and waves up to 10 metres. Brian from ‘Miss Tippy’ was knocked over the head when his spinnaker pole broke and rendered unconscious with a gaping head wound. Sheila and the three children took control of the boat, turned around and motored 20 hours to the nearest land fall to get Brian to hospital.

Brian is now sporting a new shaved head and impressive scar and everyone has been so over the moon to welcome them to San Blas after their ordeal.

The last trip has seen everyone pull together and Sue from ‘Camomile’ has done an amazing job voluntarily carrying out the roll call every day on the SSB radio so that we all stayed in contact and shared information. She was so brave after getting a huge wave in the cockpit and into the cabin below during the night and then, just before roll call, losing their drogue(sea anchor) overboard, she sounded very shaky over the radio until we all chatted, shared our experiences and gave our support.

John and Sue join us on Tuesday morning, flying into the tiny island of Porvenir where we are anchored.

It should be interesting as we have been ashore and there are just a few shacks, one of which is the flight control tower, one is customs and there is a ‘hotel’.

Well we are reliably informed that it is a hotel, although not as we know them, we have booked a pork meal for tonight so that will be a new experience.

Anyway – back to John & Sues’ flight…. The runway is a small track overgrown with weeds and it extends around 500metres, the whole length of the island, dipping into the sea each end.

The planes are very small so we are sure it will be fine – luckily John & Sue have already begun their journey and won’t be reading this !!

We have already met some of the indigenous Kuna Indians and spent some time haggling to buy ‘Molas’ from a couple of ladies in a dug out canoe who visited the boat.

Molas are hand stitched ‘tapestries’ made using several layers of fabrics, each layer cut out and stitched, to form pictures.

We later met the ladies again ashore, sat on an old sofa outside the ‘hotel’ stitching away.  

Sorry no pics yet until we get internet in a weeks time at Panama.

We are transiting the canal around 10-13 Feb so look up the web cam site so that we can give you all a wave as we go through.

We will give exact dates and timings once we have them.