Crippled in Colon!

Saturday December 3rd
Shelter bay Marina. Colon.

We had finally arrived in Colon, after a miserable week of weather and boat problems.  It had taken us just 12 hours to do the 103 mile leg from the island of "Escudo de Veraguas" (which would normally be record time) sadly though, it had not been a pleasant sail, even though we were with the wind the whole way, and managed to average over 8 knots for the entire leg.

We made the leg from Laguna de Bluefield, to Escudo de Veraguas, on Thursday afternoon, just stopping at the very rolly island anchorage overnight, before continuing on at dawn the next day to Colon.  Our overnight stop was not the best, with strong winds, and choppy seas making it a really rolly, and uncomfortable overnight anchorage...

We hadn't been able to wait any longer in Bluefield lagoon, time had been running out and we needed to get underway and get to Colon, no matter the weather.  We had only planned on stopping overnight in Bluefield, but it had been 3 days, and we were way behind our planned schedule. So we made the 4 hour next leg to Escudo de Veraguas before carrying on to Colon.

When we left at dawn on Friday morning, we had high hopes for better weather, but no such luck. Predictably the weather did it's best to make the trip thoroughly miserable for us,  huge sea's, drenching rain, and high winds (lovely!) I was sick, as I predicted, 6 times, all over the deck, fortunately (I suppose, depending upon how you look at it) we were sailing through storms, so the "stuff of my sickness" was quickly washed away leaving the decks clean.

We just went from one storm to the next, for the entire leg, we couldn't avoid them, some of the squalls were quite bad, with wind gusting at times to over 40 knots, and Daisy rocking violently from side to side, doing her "broken wheel on the big dipper at the fairground" imitation.

I was laying horizontal (as usual) in the cockpit, and Bob was at the helm, although thankfully due to all his efforts, the auto-pilot was now (finally) co-operating.
The sails were going up and down like yo-yo's, as we tried to sail rather than motor, (the sails would have stopped most of the rocking) but then suddenly the wind dropped from over 30 knots to 3 knots, and we found ourselves bobbing around like a cork,  in sunshine (no less) for about 10 minutes!

The engine went on, the sails came down, the sails went up, and the engine switched off, and so on, and so on, and so on for 12 (long) hours...
Eventually we pulled exhausted into the bay at the entrance to the Panama canal, and motored to the anchorage, as it was now too late to get into the marina, and it was already starting to get dark.

I dropped anchor (again without incident, I'm obviously improving) and then went back to the cockpit to grab the stuff from the fridge to get dinner, we were both starving having had only chips and nuts since 5:30am that morning. Being a totally useless sailor, I just don't function in the galley while underway, so we all tend to just go hungry until we're able to drop anchor somewhere, and I can function normally again.

Bending over the fridge to gather my ingredients I was suddenly gripped by a sharp stabbing pain in my back.  I whimpered like a kitten as Bob helped me below where I lay on the floor praying I hadn't popped a disc out of place, the pain was quite bad, and the slightest movement caused me to shout out.

Just when I thought I could celebrate our eventual (and miraculously safe)  arrival at Colon, I was now immobilized like a cripple, stretched out on the floor, unable to move, once again leaving everything to Bob...

Again the joys of boat life abound!