HAUL OUT TIME--TWICE

It's been two years since our last haul out which was in St. Maarten.

We have decided we will haul out here at Shelter Bay now that our dripless coupling has arrived from Peter & Eileen (Appleseeds) via "Not So Interim". How did this work?---The cruising community at it's best. Peter brought the part from Vancouver to Cartagena, Colombia where unfortunately we had already left for San Blas. Weeks later they arrive in San Blas but we are much further west. We make it up to Shelter Bay and they are still in San Blas, hear their friends on "Not So Interim" are heading for Shelter Bay and ask them to deliver our part.

Needing anti-fouling we make a trip to Panama City. This is where we confirm how well the Panama transit system works. We left Shelter Bay Marina on the 0800 complimentary bus which takes us to the Colon Bus Station where an air conditioned express bus awaits passengers. As soon as the bus is full it leaves. The cost for this two hour journey to Panama City is $2.50 each. Arriving at the Albrook Bus Station we hail a cab to take us to the paint store. We get the 5 gallon can of anti-fouling while the taxi waits; then he takes us back to the Albrook Bus Station where we load our paint into the express bus and again when the bus is full it's off back to Colon. We arrive back in Colon in time for the 1530hours bus ride back to the Marina.

We are pleasantly surprized at how clean the hull looks. The two year old anti-fouling that we put on in St. Maarten still looks pretty good except for the rudder.

We take down the old bimini which has completely rotted through at the seams and put up a make shift awning to give us some protection from the very hot sun. It is not only hot, but there is not even a breeze which of course then brings around the no-seeums primarily at dawn and dusk. They attack us with a vengeance making us retreat inside the boat.

New anti-fouling with a raised water line.

After two weeks of frustration with the sewing machine we finally get it to work well enough to make the new bimini. Between tension problems, wrong size thread for the needle size, the biggest issue was the machine timing which we had never had to repair ourselves before....Needless to say I was a very happy lady once we got it up and running.

Randy however is not happy with our lower rudder bushing and feels we should replace it now so we order a new one from Beneteau. Pakya shipping works very well from the United States. Two weeks later our part arrives in Panama City so back we go to pick it up.

Hauling out again Randy manages to replace the bushing within a day so this time we were able to get back in the water after only one night.