While Jonathan was onboard he shot lots of film, from inside the cockpit, up the mast and racing along side us in the dingy. He has created a fantastic short video of our sail from Bonaire to the San Blas, you can find it here – 

https://vimeo.com/155366014. The password is RAYA.

We have had a very busy week preparing for our passage to Galapagos and meeting with old friends. One of the great things we are discovering about this trip is how many of our friends are managing to join us. We first met Peter and Junko during our stay in Japan, then we were all posted to Sweden together, they now live in Florida. Panama is part of Peter’s professional patch so they and thier girls came to see us for the weekend. We returned to the old town for dinner. What a difference from last week, after the Carnaval holiday, Panama City has come to life. The streets are full of traffic, the restaurants and bars busting at the seams and the shopping malls bustling, the old town felt young and vibrant.

Rick and Junko, dinner in the old town

Raya is also rather full, full of fuel, full of water, full of food. We are moored on the most seaward of berthsin the marina, so getting everything to the boat is a real challenge, a ten minute trek along rickety, rocking wooden pontoons, but we are almost there, every locker is jam packed and the fridge and freezer overflowing. We are unsure how good the provisioning opportunities will be over the next few months, so we are taking advantage of the large and relatively cheap supermarkets here. The cupboards are full of tins of tomatoes, beans, corn, tuna…… Behind and below the seats we have long life bread, stocks of tea bags, coffee, flour, ketchup……. the shelves are full of fruit, biscuits, nuts…….. And every nook and cranny has a bottle of wine, can of coke or case of beer.

We hear the alcohol in French Polynesia is expensive

Penny and Stephen have arrived and we set sail tomorrow for the Las Perlas Islands, a group of small islands that lie about 30 miles off the Panamanian coast. To enter the Galapagos your hull has to be completely clean. If they find so much as a barnacle lurking in some crevice, they send you twenty miles offshore to clean it, not something we fancy. So we are stopping at these islands, where hopefully the water will be calm and clear, to take a look and ensure the diver that we paid to give us a clean up has done a good enough job. Then it’s off to Isla San Cristobal the first island on our Galapagos adventure.