Happy Days

Since I last wrote the blog last week the weather seems to have got a lot better. We left the Lemon Keys for Puerto Linton which is a town 40 miles away and we did the formalities there. You anchor behind Isla Linton with 100 other boats and it is quite rolly with the swell wrapping around but unfortunately it is only one of the few good anchorages along this bit of coast. There is a good Marina that is reasonably priced(for Panama) and a little town. The town looks very quaint and beautiful from the anchorage and then you go ashore and it is a disaster with rubbish and crap everywhere, the Panamanians don't seem to be too worried. We went to Portobello 15 minutes away to get a few supplies and then I got a message from work saying I might be going back mid January so after going back and fourth with ideas what to do we decided to come back to the San Blas. I would have liked to go through the canal and leave the boat on the pacific side when I go back to work but it is just
ridiculously expensive over there, unbelievable so here we are.
We arrived just before Julie's birthday so we spent it in the Holandes Keys, very nice chilled out anchorage and we just cooked up lots of nice food and had a few drinks and filled the tanks from the rain:) On the way in though we did manage to put a little scratch on the bottom with a bombie, very lucky it wasn't worse but was just hard to see coming in the narrow channel.
Yesterday after anchoring in another bay we could see a beautiful 50ft Catamaran sinking so we rushed over to help. Turns out they come in at night doing 6kts into an area with lots of bombies and went over a couple with a big one at the stern that broke the saildrive for the propellor. The port hull was full of water, luckily the only hole was from the saildrive and they were also very lucky there was a few young guys in the anchorage to help anyway after a lot of messing around we managed to pull the whole engine out, saildrive and all, put it on the deck and patched the hole with a piece of wood. Then they pumped out out all the water, pushed of the bombie and floated back again and made there way back Linton to haul out, never a dull moment around here.
Anyway thought that we met some nice people, Brazilians, Spanish, Italians, Americans, quite a mix. There are a lot of young people with boats here that do charters for backpackers and seem to do very well out of it keeping there cruising kitty cashed up.