Misery and Woe in Panama City…

Our 5 days anchored off La Playita Armador at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal were miserable.

Tika was trashed from the 2 day canal transit (and having 5 blokes on board), it was sultry hot and the water was dirty and un-swimmable. The kids and I had developed head colds and mine seemed to be moving more towards a tropical flu. I had a throbbing headache and felt like I should be spending 3 days in bed being waited on with lots of sympathy! Twas not to be….

With our longest passage to date looming in front of us, our battery bank needed to be replaced and both our wind indicator and our chart plotter were out of action and required a technician. Russ neglected his caring/sympathiser role and instead spent a morning hoisting a rigger up the mast to check out a sheave (our brand new halyard was showing signs of chafing causing us concern about our code zero dropping again.) The Raymarine technician and Russ also went up and down the mast at least 5 times between them. The kids and I tried to do school in the midst of the heat, the distraction of the workmen and my foggy, flu-filled head.

Swapping batteries on an anchored boat involves lugging 300 kilos of new batteries off the dock and into the dinghy. After whizzing out to Tika we then carted them off the dinghy onto the stern and then into the saloon. Once they were aboard, our marine electrician came out for a few hours  to connect them. Only then did Russ discover that they were the wrong ones and not the deep cycle batteries that had been sold to him. After a fight with the battery supplier and many phone calls to the distributor in the States, we negotiated a full refund and a swap for the right (deep cycle) batteries…   

So poor Russ had to again lug the old/new batteries off and the new/new batteries on. Our lovely technician Alejandro (who did much of the original work on Tika before we initially left Shelter Bay) returned to wire up the new batteries and finally finished at about 7pm. Russ dropped him off at the dock and came back feeling exhausted but positive. He had lugged close to a ton’s worth of batteries to and fro, but we had finally achieved a battery bank that was robust and should last us 20 years. My headache had subsided enough for me to slowly start a clean up of Tika and we all began to set our sights on getting out of Panama and heading to The Galapagos. Neither the kids nor I had left the confides of Tika’s 55ft in at least 6 days and we all needed to get out of the sweaty grime of the city/canal anchorage. 

THEN. WE. LOST. OUR. BEAUTIFUL. DINGHY.

Russ discovered it missing at 9pm. There is a chance it was stolen but we also had a dicky clip that may have jiggled loose and let go. The rope was still tied to the cleat but the dinghy was no longer attached to the other end. Shit. Russ wondered if that final, victorious disembark that he did at 7pm, having accomplished the momentous battery task, had unclipped the clip and he hadn’t noticed. A wind had popped up and we knew our beloved Tika-Taka would have been swept down wind fairly quickly. We could only hope that she was washed up on the rocks of the bay, or that a fellow cruiser had picked her up- doubtful given that it was 7pm and dark.

A lovely French man took Russ out in his dinghy and they went dodging ships and searching with spotlights (until they got pulled over by the coastguard- apparently you need  navigation lights, life jackets and permission from the canal authority to drive a dinghy around this area ) They came back for the lights, jackets and a vhf and we quickly sought and were given permission to go looking- so they tried again but Tika Taka was nowhere to be seen.

By then it was 10pm, but we took Tika out on the search, crossed the shipping channel and followed the wind, ducking and weaving around ships and desperately shining spotlights out into the bleak night looking for the familiar hull and orange stripe of our lovely little tender. At 2am we gave up. Tired and depressed, we headed back to the anchorage.

Tika Taka was not just any dinghy… she had been custom made for us by Gig Harbour Boats and shipped to Florida where we collected her just before Christmas. She was a Maine lobster boat- a rowing dory with a slide seat and two sets of artisan made wooden oars. She was also a superb sailing dinghy with a reef-able main, a furling jib and a polished, wooden tiller. She had a mahogany trim with a rope inlay and a gorgeous, polished timber bow sprit. And she was a planning dinghy with a 15hsp outboard. She was made for us. She was perfect for us. Losing her was a crushing blow.

We had come to take Tika Taka for granted, but once she was gone we tortured ourselves with memories of sailing her to islands in the San Blas and rowing her across mirrored water at sunrise around silent anchorages. During our ‘abandon ship’ drills we had talked about using Tika-Taka (with her sails and oars) as our life raft because she was so very seaworthy. She had built in flotation tanks so would be a seriously sturdy little emergency vessel if ever needed. I felt good about having her on our davits for the Pacific crossing.

We put in a claim to our insurance company (they only covered half…and she was an expensive little boat) and went out to buy a new outboard and a regular, inflatable dinghy. We spent a lot of cash and yet, we were all very disappointed with our purchase. What we have now is the same or similar tender as most cruising yachts, but to us, after Tika Taka, it is boring, small and only single-purpose  

Losing Tika Taka put us all in a funk. The kids were down and out (they loved Tika Taka) and we were in that endless conversation of ‘if only?’ and ‘what if?… Why didn’t we pull her up as soon as Russ had returned? put a second rope on her? fix the dodgy clip?”

We went back out the following day and handed out flyers to disinterested fishermen around the islands south-west of Panama City. Nobody seemed to care- even though we offered $1000 U.S cash as a reward for Tika-Taka’s return. Again, we came back to the anchorage heavy hearted.

After 3 days of gloom, it was Russ who finally said “We’ve got to go out to sea” and so we started going through the motions of getting Tika ship-shape for our 5 day passage to The Galapagos Islands. Russ did a major fresh food shop, we rattled the supplies into Tika’s hulls, lifted anchor and reluctantly headed west. A part of us wanted to stay in case Tika Taka turned up. We weren’t really ready for the passage but Russ was right, we had to physically move in order to move on. I had to remind myself that losing a dinghy was a first world problem and once we were out at sea we found a way to think positively about it. We decided that our choice of new custodians would be a salt-of-the-earth Ecuadorian family (if she wasn’t stolen or crushed by a ship, we think she would have been swept down to the coast of Ecuador) We imagined a couple fishing from the beach, when our wonderful boat gets plonked at their feet as a gift from the sea. We hope that they use her well and she becomes a way of feeding their family delicious fish for many years to come. We are sure that they need her more than us and this vision helped us to accept that we are now a cruising family with a mundane, grey, inflatable dinghy, instead of a super-cool, 14ft, sexy,  sail-able, row-able, orange striped, custom built, mother-of-all dinghies dinghy….

Next post: 5 days at sea on route to The Galapagos Islands!