Pictures from Panama - Part 2 of 3
The Fist Of God.
Another sunset.
Pelicans! (At this point, I put the stupid date marker on my pictures by accident; it's annoying.)
And another empty white sand beach... a good place for a day of leisure.
Hugh, sporting his spear-fishing yellow speedos (aka banana hammock) putting on a show for the beach goers.
Apparently them speedos work. Parrot fish for dinner.
Parrot fish is actually quite tasty but it's a bitch to clean; the scales are like armor plates.
It's hard to see, but this is a big o'le sting ray. This is what killed Steve Irwin (the Crocodile hunter) when his chest got pierced by the sting ray's long, barbed, tail-spike.
Look me in the eyes.
Art Shot!
Cleaning our kill.
The bay where we'd spend Christmas eve and Christmas day.
Some enterprising locals.
Hey mister, you want to buy an iguana?
No surf nearby so we made our own.
Paradise.
Tammy rockin' it.
Hugh's turn. That's Cameron who I'll talk about in a second.
We met the hired captain of this yacht and his friends; the owner was back in the states so we got to go over a play for Christmas Eve.
Over dinner, Hugh and Cameron, the captain, talked about how they had both sailed in Tahiti and how they had both met Liz Clark. Hugh had long ago sent Tammy this inspirational story that had been posted on Liz Clark's website.
It turns out that the author of the story; the story that had so moved both Hugh and Tammy; was none other than the man sharing Christmas eve dinner with us on the only other boat we had seen for days in some random bay 90 miles off the coast of Panama. Needless to say, it was kind of a moment; Cameron was really stoked that his story had been enjoyed so much. We ended up having a great night with lots of wine involved; it was a Christmas Eve I won't soon forget.
Dear Santa:
Pumping the bilge. Where the water came from is still a mystery.
A hidden village; I wish we had time to check it out.
The yacht that Cameron worked on and Khulula; the only boats in a beautiful spot.
Another shot of the bay.
Khulula.
So that's how palm trees reproduce...the seed's in the coconut.
Leaving to do our overnight passage from the Las Perlas Archipeligo to the North end of the Gulf of Panama. It looks like we're in for calm sailing all night... we were wrong. I'll write another post about that passage (my first open water, overnight sailing experience) soon.
See how innocent that little anvil shaped cloud on the horizon looks...it wasn't.
Essentially we sailed right up against a big, lightning filled, low pressure system. The low pressure was sucking wind from the high pressure over the Gulf of Panama resulting in 25 to 30 knot winds, wind swell, and a much more eventful sail than we had anticipated. I got soaked a couple of times from swell breaking over the boat.
Tammy and Hugh in their life preservers (which get harnessed to the boat so you don't fall overboard). This was probably at about 2am in the middle of howling winds and decent sized wind swell in the open ocean.