We left the 'comfort zone' of the Western San Blas yesterday and mostly sailed the 27 miles east and south to Snug Harbor. There is a Kuna town within sight, but the anchorage is several miles away from the town. We are anchored right next to another really cute little sandy island studded with palm trees.
As we move further east, the mainland gets more mountainous and rugged. There no roads out here. The only habitation is on the islands just offshore. The Kuna live on the islands, but have 'farms' on the mainland up the numerous small rivers. A farm will be roughly an acre plot with mango and avocado trees, occasionally a breadfruit tree, some corn, bananas, and a variety of veggies, etc. Sometimes coconuts. It is shared by a family or two, and someone paddles up the river daily to tend the
plot, and harvest what's ripening.
Several of the larger villages out here have airstrips left over from WW2, when the US had a presence here protecting the Canal. There is a daily early morning airplane flight that leaves from Panama City at 6am, and stops where ever there's an airstrip that someone wants to get to. I just saw the Air Panama plane headed back toward Panama City (at 7:30am).
Other than the airstrips, Colombian trading boats stop by, bringing diesel and gas, and Colombian goods, and going back with lobster (during the open season) and molas.
It is getting kind of expensive to cruise the San Blas, because every island charges an 'anchoring fee'. It wasn't too bad when the fee was $2-$5, but we were just this morning charged $10 for the privilege of anchoring overnight here.
An old Kuna guy paddled up in his 'ulu'. He didn't seem to speak much Spanish (and certainly not English). But he had a typed piece of paper in Spanish, with a stamped seal and a signature that authorizes him to collect the $10 anchoring fee for visiting yachts. I think they collect a similar fee from people flying in, also. He handed me a hand-written receipt. Typically the fee is good for all the islands and anchorages in the area covered by the town (sometimes hard to figure out), for a month.
I might have been able to negotiate him down a little for only 'just passing thru', but we didn't seem to be communicating very well at all, and I'm not a good negotiator. (Dave is still asleep).
As we move further east and south, the outlying barrier reef drops away, and our passages are pretty much 'open ocean' conditions. But there are a few islands and reefy areas closer to the coast, and those we can pass behind, we do. But the water is not as clear in close to the coast... too many rivers dumping muddy water into the ocean. So it's a bit nerve-wracking to be navigating reefy areas in less than perfect conditions. Especially with very poor charts.
We have improved our e-Navigation here immeasurably by taking advantage of a shareware program called Sea Clear. This program was written by a cruiser who just didn't want to shell out the big bucks for a commercial program. And it allows you to scan in any paper chart or chartlet, add navigation reference points, and then navigate with it. Our friends on Gilana then took the most popular cruising guide, by Eric Bauhaus, and scanned in all the chartlets for San Blas. This is what we've been navigating
with, and it is 98% spot-on. Sea Clear also supports AIS input, and we plan to add AIS to Soggy Paws when we fly back to Florida for a brief visit in June.
We also got a more accurate version of the raster charts from another cruiser. What we were using were dated from a 1982 survey and had us sailing over islands and reefs all the time (on the electronic chart, not physically). What we got was a 2001 version that is much more accurate out in the Western San Blas, but still fairly inaccurate in the lesser-traveled Eastern San Blas.
I have been using a program called Franson GPSGate to 'pipe' the one physical GPS input into my computer into 3 different programs, so I can run them all at the same time, to compare their navigation accuracy, and/or to take advantage of different features of the programs. So we regularly run the Nobeltec Visual Navigation Suite program and Sea Clear at the same time. Sea Clear, because of the guidebook charts, is best for the close in work, and Nobeltec is easier to see the bigger picture and
do the longer range navigation. Though I was leery to add a program that might de-stabilize my rock-solid primary navigation computer, Franson GPSGate is rock-solid too, and I have had no problems with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment