The San Blas Has Made Us Soft

We’ve never turned around before. Even when conditions aren’t the greatest, we just plod along with our sails reefed and me covered in seasick patches, and we get where we are going. Obviously, if we felt our lives or the boat were in danger, we would run for cover, and we don’t leave period if the weather is unpleasant. But it’s really hard to go back into the ocean after lazing in the San Blas for a couple of months, which perhaps explains why we are now picking up our brothers in Carti, an island firmly nestled in the middle of the Kuna Yala, instead of fifty miles away in Portobelo.

We were going to meet them in everyone’s favorite pirate town mainly so we could easily stock up on enough food to feed three grown men with giant appetites and have some left over for us for the next couple of months. Wishful thinking, I know. We left Porvenir, the island at the western edge of the San Blas at 8:00 a.m. with 20 knot gusts blasting from the north and 5 to 7 foot seas, nothing that we hadn’t encountered before, and before the coffee pot flipped over it was kind of fun. But then, I listened to the weather over the SSB and heard that the trade winds were going to kick up later in the week, with 6 to 9 foot seas and 15 - 20 knots of wind from the east, making it potentially very difficult and certainly uncomfortable for us to get back to the San Blas with our brothers. And to top it all off, because I had forgotten to put my seasick patch on the night before, I started to feel ill.

So we turned around. Back to a place of smooth, pleasant sailing in totally protected waters, leaving the ocean for another day. And in typical fashion, the weather cleared up that afternoon, and the bad stuff never materialized. Typical.