Shelter Bay, Colon, Panama

Shelter Bay Marina, Colon Harbour, Panama
8^th April 2012
We arrived here at Sh(w)elter Bay Marina [it’s like 35 degrees, humid and mosquito infested] on Thursday 5^th April after another tortuous and somewhat eventful journey across the Gulf of Mexico.
We hauled up the anchor in Marigot Bay on the afternoon of 27^th March and headed off to Fort Louis marina to top up our water supply. The channel to the water point was very narrow and the dock we had to tie up at was a very tight fit. It didn’t help that the cockpit steering position had a funny turn….the gear lever were out of sync. Reverse being where neutral usually is!!!
Just into the Anguilla channel we were visited by some porpoises who swam and played in the bow waves before peeling off to find another boat.
Winds were quite light and from the north as we were heading south west. So we were under engine and the autopilot. At the end of the channel a small freighter was heading down toward us so we increased speed and clouds of black smoke came out of the exhaust system …. Bit worrying. However, as the engine hadn’t been used for a few weeks we thought it was just clearing the dirt out the system.
A Butterfly flew into the aft cabin. It came out eventually and flew off after a few hours rest. Then one morning we found nearly twenty flying fish in the gunnels. They were all sizes from about 2 inches long to 8 inches. A whole family!
The gearing on the engine went a bit cranky again and we discovered an oil leak under the engine. The throttle in the pilot house steering position was playing up…. But after having a fiddle with the cockpit gear lever it seemed to be bit better.
I was on watch on the 6^th night out when I noticed on the chart plotter that our course had changed direction and instead of going south west, we were heading almost due north! I woke up the captain and he tried to correct the course by putting the autopilot on standby and turning the wheel in the pilot house but was unable to. We had no steering! Well, it seems that it is under the bunk in the aft cabin with no chance of seeing where you are going!
While we were at St Martins we also discovered that the steering wheels at both positions, in the cockpit and the pilot house, were on backwards…..the poor captain had been rapping his knuckles when turning the wheel in the pilot house and knocking the chart plotter knobs at the cockpit steering position……everything on this boat seems to work backward …….
We rocked and rolled onward toward Colon and when we were in sight of land we noticed a large number of huge ships at anchor outside the harbour wall, all awaiting transit through the canal.

　Sunset at Shelter Bay

　

Land Crabs at the marina

Can you see the monkey???

The perifery of the Marina grounds

So here we are in a tropical paradise….. Palm trees, mangroves, land crabs, howler monkeys and sloths in the jungle on the hill, we’re told, and a wide variety of butterflies and birds. The marina is on the other side of the harbour from the city of Colon, which by all accounts is quite a dangerous place.
The wait to go through the canal locks seems to be a minimum of 8 days and most of the folk here have been waiting a fortnight or more so it looks as if we may be here a little longer than anticipated!