San Blas Island (Itinerary)  

I took a photo of this map for further orientation. We'd been to Santa Marta in Colombia and then took a half day at sea to get to the San Blas Island off the coast of Panama. When Panama took over control of its country, it ceded these 365+ islands to the indigenous people, the Kuna Yala. 

It was a tender port as our ship anchored quite a ways off shore. Dean had read that a nearby island was a good snorkeling site, so we carried our fins and wore our bathing suits and skins thinking that local boaters would be after our business to take us over for a couple of hours.

One benefit of being 4-star mariners (earned by sailing 200+ days with Holland America) is that we can go to the head of the line on tender stops. We wanted to be on an early tender so we'd have enough time for the snorkel.

    
As we approached the islands, we sailed along with this gaff-rigged schooner. It was quite windy so only a few sails were in use and the 2 mainsails were reefed.

This is one of the islands. People are packed tightly on those islands that are inhabited. The vast majority of the islands, including the one where we wanted to go snorkel, are uninhabited.

 
After we boarded the tender, I took this shot of the loading platform on the side of the ship through the window.

 
The people were ready for us with their famous embroideries called molas that use multiple layers of brightly-colored fabric carefully cut and bound to display specific colors. We learned that the basic patterns were based on the traditional body tattoos. 

 
Women and children, dressed in traditional garb, posed for photos and asked each photographer for $1. Many held green parakeets, but this girl looks totally bored. 

 
Another couple on our tender had their snorkel gear as well, but no one approached us with an offer for a boat ride to the other island, so we went looking for a boat. Most pathways to the water ended up looking like this one with a rickety dock and some dugout canoes. 

 
After a number of dead ends, we found a pier with some boats with outboards. One boat was leaving with some passengers to the mainland and would be back in 25 minutes. The guy in the yellow shirt spoke a little English and appeared to be in charge. We waited, but when it returned the driver was reluctant and asked for too much money—$50 each. We continued to search...

 
Note the forked sticks used to hold power lines coming from generators and solar panels.

The solar panels were cleverly hidden from the main pathways. We weren't supposed to see the boys with their smart phones either.

There are no sandy beaches, but even if there were, you wouldn't want to go in the water because those are outhouses at the end of each pier.

 
We found a circuitous route to another dock with motor boats and this was the gas dock with the gas stored in the 55-gallon barrels. The guys here suggested that we go back to the first dock, so we gave up and headed back to the tender dock. We'd had a pretty good tour of what there was to see here.

 
Some of those dugout canoes seem to leak at a pretty rapid rate. This is my own western view, but I'd think that for a society so dependent on water that they would treat it with more care. 

The line for the tender back to the ship is already pretty long, but once we made our way over to the right dock, they were boarding the next tender.

Back on the ship, quite a number of local boats had motored out to beg at the side of the ship. These boys were chanting, "Throw money. One dollar!"

 
Even small babies are carried out in these precarious-looking boats.

Dean's log: San Blas Islands. We stayed at anchor there until almost 9pm, when we slowly made our way to the entrance of the Panama Canal. Our call time for passage was 5am. We've been through the canal twice in 2012, so refer back to that trek page for details on the canal's history, charts, diagrams, and inner workings.  

 
Even though we'd been through the canal twice, we put on our lightweight, long-sleeved shirts and wide brim hats to participate. It was a nice sunrise...

  
This is the first time the bow was open, so we took our selfie with the Grand World Voyage decal on the front of the ship.

 
The Silver Spirit was next in the convoy and followed us through the locks, Gatun Lake, and then the Miraflores Locks.  

 
We picked up a hitchhiker on our way through the locks—a skipper butterfly. The Wind Spirit, a 4-masted cruise ship circled around us as we entered Gatun Lake. It must have come in the Pacific side and probably went out the same way or maybe it spent the night in the lake.

There is one area where you can see the progress in the new large locks that are being built for the super-sized ships. After looking this photo, I went back to the shots we took in 2012 to check out the progress. Back then, they were predicting that the large locks would be completed by 2014—in time for the canal's centennial celebration. Well that didn't happen, but we can see some large cement structures in the upper left of the photo that were not there 3 years ago. Still there's a long way to go and they say, that they'll be done next year for sure. The canal provides a professional commentator that rides with the cruise ships to provide history and highlights of the 8-hour passage. Our commentator conveyed the prediction of completion just as the one had done 3 years ago.


This was approximately the same view in fall of 2012.

The commentator told us that Manuel Noriega is being held at this jail.

 
The crew does take good care of us from food and beverages to chilled, damp washcloths.

A great white heron flew over the boat as we left the last lock. Now we were in the Pacific and we have just one more stop in South America before we head across the ocean—Manta, Ecuador. Dean's log: Panama Canal.