We had a fast downwind sail close along the coast and got into Portobelo mid-afternoon. It was a beautiful day, partly cloudy, enough wind to make good time but not enough to make it uncomfortable; a nicer trip than old Chris Columbus had the first time he sailed into Portobelo, just a few months short of 500 years ago. Driven coastward by a storm, he was relieved to run into a well-protected, deep harbor instead of unbroken rocky shore, and so named it "beautiful harbor". At least that's the story.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Portobelo was the most important city on the isthmus and one of the most important of the New World. All the gold and silver extracted from the interior and the Pacific side came to Portabelo for transshipment to Spain. Naturally, all this wealth was a constant temptation to English and French privateers, and the city was protected by four forts, some on the edge of the bay, others high on the surrounding hills. All four forts have crumbled and decayed, but there is still enough of the old walls and structures to make the place picturesque. We hiked around the old forts, visited the small museum in the newly-restored Customs House, and peeked into the church which houses Portobelo's famous statue of the Black Christ. Despite some effort toward attracting tourists -- an expat couple, former cruisers who have lived in Panama for 20 years, are trying to put together a hotel and spearhead restoration of more old buildings -- Portobelo's heyday was clearly several centuries ago. It's run-down and ragged around the edges, a typical gritty Caribbean non-tourist town. A few Kuna women sell molas in the shade of the Customs House balcony, but other than a couple of Chinese families who run the grocery stores, the population is nearly all black.
One of the few indios we met was a fisherman nicknamed Lana (he and I got a little amusement out of the similarities of our names). He stopped by one day and Britt traded him a few magazines for a shell; a few days later, he came by selling fish, and we bought three medium-sized fish and two small lobsters from him for a couple of bucks. We told him that normally we fished for ourselves, but that the previous day we'd gone out near Isla Drake, by the mouth of the bay, and caught nothing.
"Yeah, I saw you," he replied in Spanish. "No fish there. I go over there," he pointed to the south side of the bay, "lots of fish, lots of lobster." He used a pole spear like ours but a bit more basic, just a length of metal; "I used to have a spear gun, but the rubber broke, and I can't get more until I go to Colón." We chatted a little more, had a beer or two, and before he paddled away we had set a date that he would stop by the next morning and we'd all go out fishing together, to what he called "Playa Langosto" (Lobster Beach). He promised us we'd find lots of fish and lobster, and we did see a few, but it was still slim pickings. Britt got a porkfish (a type of grunt), and Lana gave us a huge crab, so at least we got some meat.
But cruisers can not live by seafood alone (not even us), so we bought a few groceries in town. We got sugar and flour, which we were running out of, at one of the Chinese groceries, and at a vegetable stand we got all sorts of fresh stuff, including a big bag of juicy red tomatoes. Oh yes, we were back in civilization (of a sort), so we spent like sailors. We went out to lunch twice, and did laundry for the first time since Cartagena. (Hand washing in a bucket doesn't count!) It's easy to be extravagant when things are relatively cheap, as they appear to be here.
I don't think we've put anything in these logs yet about Panamanian money. The unit of currency here is the Balboa, and it's at par with the US dollar. In fact, a "one-Balboa bill" is green on one side and grey on the other, with a picture of George Washington; Panama doesn't print any paper money, so US bills are used. Panamanian coins are denominated in fractions of Balboas, or in "centisimos", but they are the same sizes and types of metal as the corresponding American coins, and both types are used interchangably here, even in vending machines.
One
reason we came to Portobelo when we did was to catch up with Neal and
Greta on Namirda. We'd met in November, in
the Aves, and anchored near them in Curacao in December. Over
drinks, we had made vague plans of helping them as two of their
required line handlers through the Panama Canal.. We loaned them a
software CD just before we left for Cartagena; they were waiting on
refrigeration parts, but expected to follow in a day or two.
Well, everyone knows what happens to cruising plans. After two weeks we stopped expecting them. We spent a lovely month in Cartagena; our guest arrived, the weather improved, and we prepared to head down to the Rosarios in preparation for the crossing to the San Blas Islands. As we motored out of the inner harbor, we saw a boat coming in -- it was, finally, Namirda. We chatted briefly on VHF and agreed we'd see them in the San Blas in a week or two. A month later, we were in Green Island and we heard Neal on the radio with another boat, saying they'd just arrived in the Holandés Cays a few days before. We broke in and told them we were at Green Island, and Neal said they would head over later that day. But they never showed up, and we'd been there for nearly a week, so the next afternoon we moved on. Namirda, we later heard, arrived an hour later. Over the next few weeks, we called them every once in a while, but they usually don't have their VHF on. When we finally reached them, we were in the Holandés. They were 7 miles away in the Lemon Cays, and planned to leave for Portabelo the next day, so we figured we'd head over to the Lemons and see them. As we sailed along, we saw a boat coming the other way. Yup, it was Namirda. They had decided it would be easier to leave early in the morning from the Holandés! Since we ended up sitting an extra day at Chichime because of weather, by the time we got to Portabelo we half expected to find that they'd already left.
But they must have decided they'd had enough of leading us on a goose chase, and we anchored next to them. They continued on to Colón the next day, but not before we had a nice social evening (nearly three months after our last one!), and they returned our CD. A few days later they passed a message to us via another boat on the SSB net that their transit is scheduled for Sunday, March 17. So today we sailed for Colón, a nice downwind run (and test of our last whisker pole fix). We even caught a big tuna along the way! Sunday morning, much too early, we will board Namirda for our trip across the isthmus.
