Sunriser

November 12th we departed from Roatán in Honduras for Panama for a passage of 13 days in total, with three stopovers. This route is particularly challenging for several reasons: it requires to sail 500 miles due east of a total of 900, in an area with prevailing east winds; only in the month of November are there a couple of opportunities where the wind is North or Northeast. A further hurdle is that there are regular reports of piracy by the Nicaraguan coast; where the pirates can be fishermen trying to ‘catch’ al your electronics, or drugtraffickers who want your boat. so the safe route requires to keep out of the fishing zones 200 miles distance from the coast, making the trip much longer. To top it up, November is still hurricane season and the weather quite unpredictable. Jos has been the whole summer worried about this trip and preparing countermeasures and procedures if an incident would have happen. One of these preperations was to collect some old phones and tablets to give.

The first leg was a short trip to Guanaja, the last port of Honduras to clear out customs and immigration.

The weather has challenging with rain, wind and waves so we did not set foot on Guanaja but just went ashore under the rain to a small island where the immigration and customs office is, with the intention of doing the paperwork as fast as possible and proceed our travel before the wind really turned against us. That turned out to be impossible as the authorities closed the port due to the bad weather and would not allow us to leave.

The following day the weather gods looked slightly friendlier upon us and we were allowed to leave, not before long negotiations with the authorities and mooring next to a big rusty ship in order to carry over diesel jerrycans to Sunriser.

A further 24 hours of motoring under the rain and we arrived to Swan island, an outpost of the Honduran Navy. The officials looked rather like shipwrecks than military and were indeed in sheer need of supplies so we gave them oil, beans, cheese, bread and butter in exchange for a photo with the only uniformed armed soldier.

This time the weather was better, except for the occasional squalls, and we sailed all the way in three days to the next pit stop, the island of Providencia. Nothing happened and other boats went through the fishing area and had no problems (but a lobsterpod in their propellor). We were looking constantly at our radar to see if anything would pop up. Were we in retrospect too anxious about this trip?

Providencia is part of the archipelago of San Andrés which is Colombian territory so we had to go through the whole immigration procedure again for a short stay of three days. It was, however, a very pleasant vacation: we toured the island by motorbike with our friends Olivier and Serge from Sohoc, swam, snorkeled and shared nice meals together.

For the last leg of the trip to Panama we took 38 hours in about two nights and one day. For night sailing we have adopted a watch system from 21:00 to 9:00, divided in 4 watches of three hours. The one who is not on watch gets then three hours of uninterrupted sleep (unless there is some incident which requires both of us to be present). Jos also sneaks now and then a nap when everything is quiet. The first days are tiring, but after three days the body adapts to the constant movement and noise and we settle into a routine much like life on land.
This time, as we split the passage in shorter trips we arrived quite tired as we did not have the opportunity to get accustomed to life at sea. So, we were very happy when we saw the coast line of Panama.

The coming weeks we will explore the Bocas del Toro archipelago and leave the boat there to be in NL for Christmas.