Pitufa.at

Usually we’re not much into sports, but last week we discovered a new exciting adrenaline sport and now we’re really hooked up. Play almost every day, fall into bed exhausted each evening, wake up with sore muscles, just to play another round of “extreme provisioning triathlon”.

The rules are quite simple:
The game starts early in the morning. The players warm up by taking several buses through the city, searching for the supermarket where the event starts. Sometimes the bus drivers add a challenge even before the game starts by telling the players to get off at the wrong bus station, hence giving them an extra chance to warm up their muscles. The players then quickly fill up two or three shopping carts and then the first discipline starts: the steeplechase.
The players wave frantically at taxis (which ignore them after a look at the shopping cart), but after 20 minutes standing in the dust and heat next to the road a taxidriver takes pity (usually one with a Micra Mouse or a similar spacey brand), the players load up the poor vehicle up to the roof and try not to catch a cold in the freezing cold interior. The taxi sets them off at the bars of the parking space and the players start running back and fourth carrying the shopping bags from the bar to the dinghy dock (the young soldiers guarding the parking space watch with mildly amused expressions behind their mirrored sunglasses–they’re the ones who refuse to open the bars). The shopping bags are then balanced down the slippery stairs to the dinghy.
By then it’s afternoon, the breeze has picked up to provide waves with white caps and the second part of the competition can start: dinghy splashing! The players load up the dinghy as high as possible (careful, stumbling on the steps and dropping a bag into the water or falling headfirst in results in minus points–one of the players has found out that already), ride out the overloaded dinghy half a mile to the boat, heave up the wet, salty bags onto the deck and go again to collect the rest of the bags.
When all bags have reached the deck the third part starts: tucking away.
All bags need to be washed, dried, contents organised, rice/flower/etc. is repacked into weevil/cockroach/mealworm-save containers and then everything is stuffed wherever space remains (bilge, hidden lockers under matraces, etc.)

Yesterday we decided to take a day off from extreme provisioning and try a different sport instead: extreme laundrying. Taking the laundry ashore to wash it and back to the boat resembles the steeple chase and dinghy splashing or extreme provisioning, but then the real challenge comes up: in gusts up to 25 knots the players thread the clothes on the line (just clipping them on to the line would result in lost items and loss of points). As the clothes are lashing violently about, protective gear (helmet, protective goggles) is recommended. Don’t try this at home, kids!

We’ve spent the past few days in a provisioning frenzy: a tour to a cheap supermarket, another one to a hardwarestore (who has ever spent 5 hours in a hardwarestore??), yet another one to a more sophisticated supermarket–each trip took us a full day, first searching for the right bus, then waiting endlessly for a taxi and in the end shipping all the bags half a mile through splashy seas by dinghy.

We’ve already managed to pack the content of 6(!) big shopping carts into Pitufa’s belly (which wasn’t empty before…) and still have to go booze shopping. Friends have packed 100 litres of wine on their boat and we’ll try to manage the same

All this provisioning must seem ridiculous to people who have the next supermarket 5 minutes by car away, but were we sail next there won’t be lots of (affordable) food available. After the Galapagos (minimarkets on Isabela) we’ll head out to the Gambier islands (small shops, hopefully lots of fruit and veggies in private gardens), next to the Tuamotus (tiny islands that get basic food from supply ships) and then in autumn to the Marquesas (small shops and lots of veggies). We won’t see another supermarket until we reach Tahiti in spring next year–and as Pitufa’s a gourmet boat we’ll fill her up completely.

Not only food is hard to get by and expensive, there won’t be big hardware stores either so we have to be prepared to fix everything that might break on the way ourselves with our own gear.

On the bright side: all the provisioning stress keeps us from being nervous about sailing out on the Pacific. A few weeks of constant sailing, nightwatches etc. seem like desireable holidays after Panama City. Initially we liked the city but by now we’re quite fed up: sales personnel is as unmotivated as it gets, moving in slow motion, trying to send customers to another shop just to get rid of their annoying questions. Another problem is the pollution: it hasn’t rained since mid-December, the air is filled with dust and smoke and we regularly have big ashflakes snowing gently down on Pitufa.

It’ll be nice to get to a cleaner, more quiet place. Hopefully sometime next week.

We’ve had quite an eventful week with my Dad, visited the old town centre, sailed over to Taboga and back, took a “Diablo Rojo” (a local bus, crammed full with people loud music hammering down) to the 16th century ruins of Panama viejo as an adventure trip, visited the Miraflores locks and took a walk in the Parque natural metropolitano. Today my Dad flies back to cold Europe, and we’re back to pre-Pacific-preparations

We finished all our electronics projects in time before my father arrived last Tuesday. Since then we’ve been doing touristy things (sightseeing in the casco viejo, strolling through town)–nice after two weeks of constant work. Unfortunately the sea is very murky at the moment, lots of tiny creatures are around, sometimes bright red clouds drift through, at night they fluoresce spectacularly like bright turquoise fireworks in the wake of the dinghy (a phenomenon called “red tide” that occurs from time to time here), so swimming’s not really possible. We took the boat over to the island of Tobago hoping for clear water there, but it was just the same. We only used a patch of clear water on the way back to Panama city to have a quick swim, quite funny with all the big ships anchored around, waiting for the Panama Canal.

Unfortunately our time in the Perlas is coming to an end, we really liked this archipelago. We’ve returned to the northern island of Contadora to clean the barnacles off the hull and to wait for favourable winds to sail back to Panama City.

We enjoyed the last few days in the calm anchorage behind the little island Espiritu Santo. We circumnavigated the island by dinghy, beached it on a powdersugar-white beach on the eastside and walked out to a little islet that is connected with the island during low tide. Due to the enormous tidal range (at spring tide like now it’s more than 4 metres) the landscapes change completely every few hours: reefs turn into islands, caves are revealed and in the tidal puddles all kinds of sea creatures can be found.
The day after we took the dinghy at high tide up a river on Isla del Rey, a fascinating experience to paddle out with the current again silently through the jungle, watching lots of different birds, listening to the squeaking, humming, chirping jungle sounds.

Christian used the calm anchorage to change the diesel filters, started dismounting dodgy electronic gear from the radar arch to make space for the new ones that are already waiting for us in Panama City. I couldn’t do much, as I’ve overstrained my right wrist during the past few weeks (carrying the heavy dinghy up beaches, hauling up the outboard, etc.) and tried to keep it as calm as possible to get rid of the chronic pain (try not to use your right hand for a while, it’s impossible, even more so on a boat…). The positive result of this was that Christian finally came up with a simple solution for a crane for the outboard–something we’ve been talking about for ages and which will make life a lot easier (and safer).

Today we took the dinghy to explore the huge bay and the channel between Isla Canas and Isla del Rey and then beached in front of the small nearby village, La Ensenada, which turned out to be much nicer than the last one. We bought a few things from the tiny shop, found people willing to sell some veggies from their gardens and purchased a freshly caught fish from a lancha that came in a short time after us.

The day before yesterday we sailed Pitufa back south. Again we got the timing wrong and had a strong current against us, the combination with about 15 to 20 knots of wind with us the resulted in steep, short waves that made the ride quite uncomfortable. Nevertheless it was an exciting trip: we saw a small whale (we think a pilot whale), a school of stingrays surfing down the waves right under the surface and caught the largest fish so far: about 1 m long (we’re not sure what it was, maybe some kind of mackerel). As the fish was far too big for the three of us we shared it in a beach bbq on Casaya with our friends from sy Spruce and sy Iolea.

Yesterday we returned to our favourite spot: Isletas de Platanal. It’s a magical place with an abundance of wildlife. Fish are jumping everywhere, a colony of a few hundred pelicans live on the island and we saw an incredible number of cormorants flying by (more than 10 000 for sure…). From the boat we heard loud grunting sounds, but when we took the dinghy ashore, there was no sign of the seals we had hoped for (we’ll check again today). High up on the beach we found large dugout holes that baffled us, until we discovered a baby turtle in one of them: it’s turtle hatching time and the babies must have dug themselves out of the sand the night before leaving those large holes behind. The poor little guy (about 8 cm long from tail to head) we found was stuck under a root and when we took him to the water he was too weak to swim. We didn’t want to leave him as food for the pelicans, so we took him back to the boat, planning to release him in the cover of the night, but unfortu nately he died in the evening.

The tides are so high at the moment (about 5 m difference, because of the spring tide) that the rocks that bridge the 3 little islands of the Isletas the Platanal stick out high at low tide, but disappear completely at high tide. You want to be extra careful when anchoring in conditions like these–it would be a nasty surprise to sit on the bottom at low tide