Upcoming Sailing Trip

On Thursday morning, Nan and I are off to Panama to begin the sailing trip I wrote about last August in "A change in plans". Since I wrote it, there have been other changes in the plans. Instead of sailing from May 1 to 15, we will be sailing from April 24 to May 7, and instead of ending the trip in Key West, Florida, we will be ending it in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. The shorter distance means that we can take our time and explore more areas of coastal Central America.

According to Captain John, the for-sure stops are Providencia, a small Colombian island off the coast of Nicaragua; Roatan in the Bay Islands off Honduras; and South Water Cay and Placencia in Belize. With our added time, other likely stops could include Corn Island, off Nicaragua; Cayos Cochinos in the Bay Islands of Honduras; Banco Chinchorro and Cozumel, islands off the east coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula; and Punta Allen, along that same coast.

Our starting point will be Bocas del Toro, Panama, where John left his cutter-rigged Kaufman 47 sailboat, Quetzal, after his last trip. Bocas is on the Caribbean side of Panama, close to the border with Costa Rica, but we can't fly there directly from the United States, so we will be flying into Panama City and spending a night at a hotel right on the Panama Canal. I hope to do a tour of the Canal the next day since we don't catch our puddle jumper to Bocas until mid-afternoon. We'll meet up with the rest of the crew and spend the night on the boat before taking care of final provisioning and shoving off by noon on Saturday.

We're looking forward to returning to Isla Mujeres again, at the end of our trip, after our month-long stay there last fall. We have asked John if we could arrive a day earlier than planned so we can spend a little more time with our friends there. I am still working on Los Sabores de Isla Mujeres (Tastes of Isla Mujeres) with Juan and Paula, and we would like to take a look at Teresa and Luis's apartment on Laguna Macax as a possible future rental.

It is my hope to update this blog with photos and descriptions over the course of our trip, depending on the availability of Internet access, so please check back starting later this week. Away we go!