Shooting Stars and Flying Fish: Swapping the boardroom for the seven seas

by Nancy Knudsen

  The sky is full of flying yellow sand. The thirty-five to forty knot winds are blowing the deserts of Colombia into the sky and a lot of it is falling on Blackwattle. The boat is jarring and leaping around, and it’s very noisy, with the whine of the wind and the clanging of the halyards. As usual we have the anchor alarm on, but never do we doubt our Spade anchor that we purchased in Turkey. What a difference this has made to our sleeping.

  After two days, choked with yellow dust over the dodger and topsides and deck of the boat, over every lifeline, sheet and halyard, the forecast says we can make a break for it. We stop for some overnights at a deep gulf in a coastline called Five Bays, and then it’s a swooping overnight sail as we swing southwards around the coastline of South America. The moon is still riding high as the sky lightens to morning, the ocean turns pearl grey, the sea calms, the winds drop to nothing and Cartagena appears out of the mist.

  What a glorious ancient city this is, yet as modern as tomorrow. How glad we are that we ignored advice to avoid Colombia. When we go sightseeing, I feel like a bee that has just discovered a new field of flowers – the grace of the buildings in the Old Town is stunning. The flowing lines, the variety of shapes and colours is what the Colombians take for granted as they go about their daily lives. But we are entranced by Old Cartagena as we wander around it in the company of some new cruising friends, Larry and Ken from Julia. No wonder it is a World Heritage Site. There are arcades within arcades, small secret places with unexpected cafes, waterfalls in gardens, behind walls, over hedges. Each corner turned reveals wholly new vistas – grand buildings or slim terraces, tiny overhanging verandahs. The handicrafts are superb, the market stalls full of wonders. Not to mention the beauty of the women. Ted Nobbs is gaping like a child in a candy store.

  Goodbye, Colombia, we’re nearly out of the Caribbean, with only the San Blas between us and the Panama Canal.

  17. The Vanishing Island

  The San Blas

  I stand on the bow of Blackwattle, bare feet planted each side of the anchor on the varnished gunwale, back against the fabric furler of the forestay. It’s a cotton-wool-cloud day in a happy blue sky, and there’s a sweet-smelling fifteen-knot breeze tickling the sea into a small chop. I laugh. More like a chopette!

  Eyes shaded, loving the sun on my skin, I’m staring over the deep blue waters ahead, my Polaroids helping me look for telltale signs of coral reefs or shoals. When I lift my eyes for a moment I count thirteen palm-tree-sprouting islands dotted around me, looking like ragged broom tops, but I know that somewhere out there are more than 300 of these broom-topped islands. I am in the San Blas.

  ‘A little to the left,’ I call into my small two-way bow-to-cockpit mike. The boat changes direction slightly, missing a coral outcrop. We’ve been here a few days, chilling out after a stimulating journey from Cartagena. Now life is reduced to utter simplicity.

  As I watch for shoals, I remember our last few days.

  We have been anchored with less than a metre under the keel, the anchor visible from the bow in the clear water. We have swum, snorkelled and slept. We’ve met another Australian boat which arrived here a year ago meaning to stay a couple of weeks, and simply couldn’t find a strong enough reason to move on.

  ‘That’s the way the San Blas gets you,’ the skipper explains. ‘Why go home? Parking meters, parking fines, traffic . . . spending money on clothes and restaurants, cars, houses. Here we are in paradise, yet we spend nothing.’ Yachties must merely renew their documentation every now and then, and there are dozens of ‘local’ yachts that stay for years. They have made their own community. We tune in to their morning ‘Cruisers Net’ on the HF radio, and listen to their chatter about yoga lessons and Scrabble days, birthday parties and beach barbecues.

  But this is a community of strangers. The ‘real’ community is of the Kuna Indians, one of the smallest races on earth, and one of the most determined to retain their own culture. As we stay a while, and learn, it’s inspiring to see these tiny indigenous people controlling their own future in a peaceful and organised way.

  The ‘Congreso General Kuna’ have come by in a longboat to explain to us through a translator the Kuna rules: no spear fishing, no lobster catching, keep your garbage, dress properly if you visit an island. We are also told that every coconut tree is owned by ‘someone’ so please don’t steal the coconuts. We’ve paid US $10 for the privilege of anchoring here for three months, and we are told that local villages may ask for an extra $5. We set off to anchor near Mormake Tupu village on the island of Maquina, where one of the famous ‘master mola makers’ of the San Blas lives, and we are hoping to be invited to visit the village.

  On the way, though, there is a disturbing incident. As usual, we watch our electronic chart carefully, our paper charts and also our cruising guide to the area. For once they all agree, and I count three islands that we must pass to reach the island of Maquina.

  I am steering, but Ted must be giving me the wrong information. ‘I can only see two islands,’ I call.

  ‘Are you on the right course?’ he replies.

  ‘My course hasn’t changed.’

  He checks the charts, and then checks again. Three islands. I turn the boat around. We cannot proceed if we don’t know where we are. We check our GPS position again and again, check against the other coastal indicators. It’s easy to make a mistake here, because all the islands look alike, each not more than a metre of sand high, covered by palm trees.

  Then I see it.

  ‘Look, Ted, there!’

  ‘Where?’

  As I point, and he sees it too, we stare in horror.

  ‘Yes,’ he breathes. It is in the right position, just as we expected. But there’s one difference. It is now merely a swirl of water. The island, which must have been there when the charts were made (and our cruising guide is the latest edition), has disappeared beneath the rising water level.

  It is one thing to understand intellectually that the world’s water levels are rising. Respected scientists of the world agree that it is so. But to be faced with it a few metres from our bow is so shocking that I begin to feel physically ill. To realise that the people of the Maldives, of many islands in the Pacific and of these gentle San Blas Islands are to lose their homes, where they have lived for thousands of years, because of what our society has done is disquieting in the extreme. How can the peoples of the world blindly continue to lead their comfortable lifestyles? More to the point, how can I?

  ———

  As we approach the island of Maquina, we see nothing but matted and thatched roofs, jammed together and covering all of the island, a jumble of different shades of brown. Along the shore, washing hangs on lines, and the occasional fisherman sets out or returns. Drawing closer, there are wharves abutting almost every house, rickety things lining the shore, with dugout canoes attached. The master mola maker’s brother, Idelfonso Restrepo (whom we had met before in another anchorage), has watched us arrive and is waving from his wharf, made mostly of bamboo. Idelfonso is extremely unusual in the San Blas, in that he speaks English.

  Idelfonso takes us first to pay our respects to the Sahilas of the village – the chiefs, who are elected every four years. We are led through bamboo and coconut alleyways between thatched huts, followed by a train of giggling kids, the younger ones naked. After much shaking of hands with the Sahilas’ secretary, and in return for our US $5 fee, we are given permission to anchor in Maquina waters for one month, renewable. It is all explained very carefully, and we are given a handwritten scrap of paper torn with care from an exercise book, slightly crushed, but duly signed, and sealed with the ink-stamp of the village.

  Formalities over, Idelfonso walks us through his house. We are led from his wharf on the water, where the washing hangs, past a ‘kitchen’ with an open fire. His house is a long, narrow, bamboo-walled thatched hut, dark inside, slats of light spearing the dar
kness from the cracks between the bamboo. He shows the ‘public’ rooms, the ‘bed’ rooms, and then his ‘shop’ where he sells T-shirts and lollies, on the ‘street’. One narrow corridor joins the rooms, all off to one side. Underfoot is fine-packed dirt.

  We walk through the village on narrow pathways. People stand at their doors, staring and smiling. Tiny coloured beads, fitting as snugly as stockings, and creating intricate patterns, are wound around the legs and arms of all the women. They also have intricately multi-layered and multicoloured bodices, which are the focal points of their otherwise plainly wrapped bodies. These bodices are the molas, for which the San Blas are famous. Traditionally, girls make molas for their trousseaux, ready for marriage; these days, the villages earn extra income by selling them to tourists.

  We stop to buy some molas from Idelfonso’s brother, Venancio, who is a master mola maker renowned for his craftsmanship. Tradition decrees that only women make molas. However, if a family has no daughters, one of the boys is brought up as a girl-child, and this is how one gets to be a ‘master’ mola maker. Venancio runs a bamboo-walled factory of women who make the fine molas. Almost the only people who ever visit this island are cruising sailors like ourselves. They offer to bead my wrist, and I willingly sit as one young woman, with a gaggle of children straining to see, makes me a Kuna wristband reaching halfway to my elbow. How sad that we cannot stay in the San Blas longer, and how many times have we said this in our circumnavigation?

  As we leave I experience a hollow feeling of bad faith. I am still thinking about how we are part of the reason that island has disappeared. But it’s hard to stay morose when we’re about to sail for Panama. I am excited, but there is also a curious feeling of trepidation in my solar plexus when I think on this – like when an examination is around the corner, or the headmaster has just summoned you to the office and you don’t know why. The Panama Canal has a fascination, but Panama also means a crossing to the Pacific, and the Pacific means we’re getting close to home. What then? What then? I ask myself. But there is no answer.

  18. Wilting Military Cities and Howling Monkeys

  The Panama Canal

  It’s another overnight sail to reach Colon Harbor on the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. We dock at Shelter Bay Marina, our last marina for many months, where we shall make arrangements to transit the canal. It’s a joy to meet many cruising friends there, Mary Constance and Fantasy1 among them. Each has made their way at their own pace, and now all are to transit the great canal in time for the best winds of the Pacific.

  At first the marina building appears, long and low with wide verandahs. Then you start to notice similar buildings on the skyline, weedy bitumen roads into the rainforest, ancient fire hydrants – and realise that you have arrived in some kind of a ghost town. Asking questions, you find it’s not an ordinary or even small ghost town, but an immense, wilting, military city, a leftover from the US presence in Panama.

  On our first foray out of the marina we find that lush dense jungle is fast smothering this dead military enclave which once housed many thousands of troops. Weeds grow on the footpaths and leaves fall unchecked over the concrete roads, collecting in deepening pools. The street signs are still there – Kennedy Way, Parson’s Loop – and one-way signs too, controlling the ghostly traffic, as well as churches, solid officers’ residences, stairways to nowhere where barracks have been removed. In the empty air it’s easy to imagine lines of soldiers, snapped to attention, whiffs of diesel as the jeeps roll by – basketball being played in off hours, jungle runs in the morning, the clatter of the mess rooms. Now, as the forest reclaims its own, the monkeys are taking over, yelping to each other and making impossibly long leaps high above us through the canopy. The chorus of birdcalls sways back and forth over our heads as we walk. We’re glad for them, these returning inhabitants.

  There is little else here. On the other side of Colon Harbor, the city of Colon has but one attraction – the supermarkets, vital for our provisioning. For the rest, the people are poor, the streets are unkempt, unpainted, ugly and, we are warned, very dangerous. We go everywhere, as instructed, by taxi.

  In the marina there’s a constant buzz of expectation in the air. Unless you’re prepared to round Cape Horn the ‘wrong way’, against the wind and currents, there’s no option – you must transit the Panama Canal! For most yachts, it’s a one-time only transit, and yachties are jittery. It’s not very surprising – we hear stories of people losing their legs or arms when ‘something goes wrong’ in a lock. But it’s also exciting – the Panama Canal, in company with the Empire State Building, the Channel Tunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge, is one of the Seven Modern Wonders of the World.

  The idea of the canal was first mooted in the sixteenth century, but nothing practical was done about it until after gold was discovered in California. Then, in the late nineteenth century, the French started to try to dig a channel across the Panama Isthmus. There were two great difficulties to overcome – the difference in tidal range between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and the nature of the sandy soil that caused monstrous landslides. There were many failures. Not even Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, succeeded. After many years of brainstorming, crushing defeats, political storms and great courage in the face of overwhelming odds, the canal was finally completed in 1914 by the Americans, but not without a dreadful cost in lives and misery.

  The procedure today seems pretty simple. Rafted up with other boats and sharing a lock with a large ship, you enter three locks to take you up to the level of an artificial lake, sail across the lake for a few hours, then start your journey back down through three lock chambers and a small lake to emerge into the Pacific Ocean.

  When the hour for Blackwattle’s crossing comes, we’re garlanded with black tyres on each side, and on board we have our ‘adviser’ from the Canal Authority, a quiet, serious man, and four extra friends from other yachts as line-handlers, a minimum number for all transiting yachts. These friends are coming with us to get experience of the canal, and they will return by land to Shelter Bay Marina to prepare for their own crossing.

  Late afternoon we make for the first lock, spirits and adrenaline running high. We have by now rafted with another boat, and follow a very large ship. As the day disappears into night, the lights of the lock, so high above us, loom closer and closer, brighter and brighter, blinding our vision as we enter. Four lines are thrown from workmen high above on the lock edges, and, as instructed by the adviser, we dodge and hide to avoid being hit with the ‘monkey’s paw’, the iron ball at the end of the line. Once the lines are tied off, we two boats are tethered to the shore like Siamese twin bulls. The great steel gates close ominously behind us to make a black concrete prison.

  The Panama Canal wasn’t built with sailing boats in mind. The water rushes in at an alarming rate, making the dark water boil beneath us. The two boats twist and lurch, trying to escape – they’re hating this strange treatment! The strong-muscled line-handlers struggle to keep the lines taut and the boats straight. The adviser shouts instructions to the helmsmen – ‘Power forward a little!’ ‘Reverse a little!’ In just a few minutes we have risen around eight metres, and can now peer over the top of the lock.

  The canal workmen who hold our lines are now level with us. They start the long walk to the next lock, while we power forward, following the big ship and tethered like small puppies. The process is repeated twice more, and after what seems like a long time we emerge into the still blackness of Lake Gatun, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world. Here it is very quiet, our voices sound loud in the stillness of an ink-dark night. We are untethered from our twin and motor away, guided for about an hour by the adviser to an immense red buoy that we find with torches in the darkness. A launch appears out of the night to carry our adviser off, and we are abandoned for the night. Phew!

  We know the worst is over, and the pleasure is to come. We eat and drink, and
collapse into our bunks, a little tired from the physical work, but maybe more so from the tension of the unfamiliar challenge.

  I wake slowly to plaintive yowling, and for an instant I don’t know where I am – it’s the sound of howler monkeys in the rainforest at the shore. In all the cruisers’ horror tales of the Panama Canal, no one mentioned how magnificently beautiful this journey could be. Daylight comes to show us we’re in glorious surroundings, with birds chattering in the trees and swooping by in long flights. We all splash in for a swim in the fresh lake water. Blackwattle must be surprised – she’s never been in fresh water! We don’t stay swimming for long – the water is dark and there are crocodiles along the muddy banks close by.

  After a celebratory breakfast of bagels with cream cheese, eggs, smoked salmon and capers, we glide all morning through the lovely waters of the jungle-edged lake. Great goliaths of ships pass with their tugboats before and aft. We see the Smithsonian Wildlife Research Station on the shore, and even pass a US nuclear submarine, surrounded by guarding powerboats, their gun-holding inhabitants looking ferocious in flak jackets.

  Early afternoon we raft up again with our fellow yacht to descend to the Pacific Ocean. We take the first downward lock alone, just the two yachts, and as the water drains there’s no slewing of the water – it’s so easy. We’re out of the lock quickly and across small Miraflores Lake to arrive at the final double chamber lock. Thunder is rolling and just as we are about to enter these two final locks, there’s a cloud burst and visibility is reduced to nil. The rock walls are too close for comfort. A suddenly blinded Skipper Ted is shouting that he can’t f&%@ing well see, and the whole crew is shouting contradictory instructions at him from the deck in the driving rain. Everyone is shouting and no one is listening. It’s Panama Pandemonium. The rain then clears as suddenly as it appeared and we enter the chamber safely after all, albeit with a dripping crew.