Our last few days have been spent provisioning, provisioning and more provisioning! We've got all our food but most importantly we're well stocked up on beer and wine! We spent a good few hours in the wine isle in the supermarket and our 400 cans of beer should last us a few weeks at least. At 40p a can you've got to take advantage especially when a beer is $6 in French Polynesia!

We've found taxi rides to and from the city are very interesting, the main issue being that the taxi's are in very very poor condition. One poor chap had even painted his red car bright yellow to try and be a taxi, he had yellow paint drips down the windows, lovely! The best one had an exhaust pipe which was the same diameter as a large watermelon, played very very loud music and scraped the underneath of the car as we drove along. According to his petrol gauge he had no fuel and the engine temperature guage said the engine was about to blow up. It'll all good fun though! Friday we managed to do a deal with the man who filled up our gas bottles, he'd give us a lift to the supermarket for $5 (the same as we'd pay a taxi), and he'd organise a minibus for us to come back with all our provisions and we'd pay $20. Anyway, half way there he ran a red light and was promptly pulled over by the police, who made us all clamber out and stand and sweat on the side of the road at Chorillo (the ghetto) while he issued the gas man a ticket. When we eventually arrived he tried to charge us $5 each, there were 4 of us - we're finding everyone in Panama is corrupt in some shape or form, when it's too late to go back they try and charge you more and sometimes you have no option but to pay it. Understandably we gave him his $5 and told him to bugger off and to forget bringing us home.

On Sunday night Richard and Boot, the BWR organisers treated us to a lovely Italian meal as a thank you for having Richard on board during our transit as he was one of our line handlers. There are lots of restaurants lining the anchorage and we hadn't tried any as we've eaten on board all week so it was nice to get ashore.

We were originally planning on leaving yesterday but we still had a few things left to do so instead of rushing off we decided to take one more day and we're now leaving today, Wednesday. We've had no wind for the last few days so we really noticed the heat yesterday, the temperature was 35 degrees during the day and 30 degrees at night with 95% humidity! It's very sweaty! With no wind we could be in trouble as we could need a lot of fuel to get to the Galapagos. Last year boats ran out of fuel as it can be a tricky passage wind and current wise. All last week the wind was gusting through the anchorage and this week we have none - typical!

We spent our last evening in Panama having a meal ashore with Blue Magic and Perigrina. We were also supposed to be joined by Raylah who we thought had rudely stood us up. However, as we finished our meal Simon from Raylah turned up to the restaurant to order a takeaway and fill us in on what had been going on in the anchorage. The wind had picked up and all the boats were bouncing around all over the place and some were even dragging their anchors. As Simon went up on deck to get ready to leave he noticed a boat who had been in front quickly moving past them, backwards! He jumped on board and helped the solo man re-anchor and in doing so pulled out their own anchor. So then Jeremy, who is also on Raylah, had to re-anchor their boat. Some yachts even picked up anchor and moved to another anchorage. Other BWR yachts had been trying to contact us but stupidly we hadn't taken a handheld radio ashore, they even left answerphone messages on our phones but guess what, we didn't have them either! We were totally oblivious until Simon turned up and we looked out to the anchorage to see the anchor lights rocking violently from side to side. This morning all the yachts are in different positions, we have one very close on our bow who wasn't there yesterday but no one appears to have any damage, thankfully.

Paul has just checked the weather and it looks like we might be motoring all the way to the Galapagos! We're in the doldrums down here (apart from the freak gust last night) so we might have to get some more fuel, it looks like the bladder is going to be back in action! Fingers crossed it works well this time, I don't fancy another four hours sat on top of it to stop it sliding off the boat!

Love the sweaty Harpers!