header photo

Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

Blog posts : "2014 Central America"

The Panama Canal

This morning it was time to do a bit of shopping at the mall, and then we were off to see the Panama Locks.  We are thinking that we will likely traverse the canal when we return to the boat in October.  So we wanted to see the locks in action.  We’ve done hundreds of locks, but of course this is “T…

Read more

Panama City

This morning we finished the last of the "get the boat ready" chores... spraying the interior with bug spray on our way out the door.  When we got to the hotel in Panama City, Dave checked and the web camera is uploading pictures as expected so Dave can monitor the electrical systems.  At some point…

Read more

Check your emergency kits regularly!

Today’s big project to get the boat ready to leave was to finalize Dave’s boat monitoring system.  He had debated how to do this… Melissa bought a Claro stick and made it good for 4 months with enough data to do whatever Dave wanted.  He thought about writing software for his Arduino system which is…

Read more

Crazy Boater

This morning Holly and Melissa headed for Panama City on the 9am ferry.  Idea was that they would do some shopping for items critical for Dave and Melissa to get in order to finish prepping the boat to be left for a couple of months, along with some other items we’ve not been able to acquire in the …

Read more

Howie the Second

Those who have been paying attention may remember our friend Howie the snake.  Howie climbed into Holly’s dive gear and scared the crap out of her.  Today his pal Howie the Second made an appearance.  (Apologies in advance for the shameless teaser!)

There’s a long list of stuff to get done bef…

Read more

Within sight of the Canal

Dave awoke at 6am to find he had been eaten alive by bug bites.  Melissa was bit too, but she doesn’t react as much as Dave who was in itch hell.  He believes that there are bugs (probably no seeums) in our bed.  So Melissa stripped the bed and went at it with a can of Raid.  Oddly we've looked in e…

Read more

The Humpbacks are Back!

We headed out this morning for Isla Contadora.  It was a nice day, and is typical there were plenty of dolphins out that came to play with the boat.

 

But it was the whales that stole the day.  And lest anyone think we chase these guys down... its clear they could care less about us boats and …

Read more

I hate food poisoning

Unfortunately the swell kicked up and Dave didn’t get very much sleep overnight.  That Means that Melissa will need to take a shift underway on the overnighter to allow Dave to get some sleep as it will be super tough to do an overnighter on only a couple of hours of sleep.

When we awoke we head…

Read more

Frogman Mike

When we awoke this morning the sun was shining and the bay was beautiful.  As hoped, this anchorage turned out to be lovely and quiet.  Everyone felt lazy and so decided to spend another day here.  “Frogman” Mike came over and scraped a few barnacles off our boat.  We so need a full bottom cleaning!…

Read more

Happy Birthday Dave

We got up early this morning and were underway by 6:30am.  We’ve got a fairly long day ahead of us, followed by an overnighter tomorrow so we wanted to get to the anchorage tonight at a reasonable hour to rest up.  And besides, it’s Dave’s Birthday and that deserves some kind of celebration at dinne…

Read more

Naranjo

This morning we set sail for a small bay called Naranjo.  We are on our way to the Las Perlas Islands, but it’s a multi-hop journey.  The good news was that Dave got the Claro SIM working in our hotspot so we were able to light up the entire boat WiFi with internet today.  Hooray!  Melissa spent muc…

Read more

I was gonna bake banana bread but the computers are in the oven

We got up early this morning and Melissa headed to Santiago on the bus.  She needed one more internet fix to deal with a broken pipe at one of the rental properties, a new lease agreement at another, and Dave’s son’s car tabs.  She figured it would be easy – just head back to the restaurant that we …

Read more

We’re legal in Panama

Woke up and headed into the port captain’s office to begin the Panama check in procedures.  Panama has strict dress code.  In public places men have to wear pants and shirts with collars, and women cannot have bare shoulders.  So we had to dress up a bit.  Though in the end it wasn’t clear how impor…

Read more

Upriver to Puerto Mutis

We left Isla Gobernadora at about 9:30 am as we wanted to head up the San Pedro river on a rising tide.  We were headed for Puerto Mutis to do the official check in paperwork for Panama.  We’ve heard that it will save us hundreds of dollars to check in here rather than in Panama City as we had origi…

Read more

Mr Moth goes for a ride

This morning we said goodbye to Bahia Honda and Dominic’s place on the beach...

 

As we were pulling out, we realized the biggest moth we’ve ever seen had landed on the cockpit cover and decided to go for a ride.  He was 5 inches across.  Later in the day it poured rain on us while underway, an…

Read more

Generator Round 2

When we got up this morning we grabbed the tools, the recharged starter battery, and the gas syphon.  The plan was to remove all the diesel from the generator and replace it with known good diesel from Wanuskewin’s deck tanks.  Bad fuel was pretty much the only thing left to try after yesterday’s tr…

Read more

Generator Round 1

We were still in bed when our first visitor of the day came knocking.  It was Kennedy’s Dad, Domingo.  (Note the nice shirt he is wearing – later it became clear he probably put on his Sunday best to come see us.)  He spoke not a word of English.  Turns out he is the guy with the “high speed dingy” …

Read more

Isla Talon

We awoke to a gorgeous morning in Bahia Honda.  Though we’ve learned this sun means it will be blazing hot.  By 9am it was 87 degrees.

This morning another man named Ishmael in a dugout canoe came by to chat.  He had a small boy and was (again) looking for English children’s books for him. …

Read more

Floating garbage

Wanuskewin called early this morning and said they were pulling up anchor and headed to a nearby rock to try and go snorkeling.  They had to anchor in 70 feet of water.  Shortly thereafter we followed them out.  Alas when we got there, the swell over the reef was rolling us around and since we hadn’…

Read more

How can a conch outsmart us?

Today we hung out at Isla Cavada all day.  Melissa did next to nothing, but Dave decided to tackle trying to fix the 2.5HP engine.  Again.  Mike had lent him a fuel filtration gadget so that Dave could clean the gas in the dingy tank as this was Dave’s best guess as to the source of the contaminatio…

Read more

20 blog posts