Getting Ready for the Pacific!!

After successfully transiting the canal and exploring Panama City, our focus turned to preparing for our next milestone - the Pacific crossing. Although we have a 7 month weather window to get to Australia, we have over 7000 nautical miles to cover and the islands we plan to visit are some of the most expensive cruising grounds in the world in terms of boat repairs and food provisioning. We heeded the advice of other travelers and decided to spend time in Panama working on our never ending list of boat projects while also stocking up on dry food for the entire trip - a little overwhelming.

Where to start? We calculated we would need supplies for 32 weeks, did a rough menu plan for 1 week and multiplied that number. We have 2 bar sized fridges on board and a 50ltr 12v freezer we bought in St Martin. Our aim was to leave with all three full to the brim. We hope to catch at least 3 fish a week and buy local fruit and vegetables as much as possible. We've heard that meat is very hard to come by on most islands.

It took $3000, three grocery stores, 15 full shopping carts and a patient taxi driver to have us back on Lazy Bones with the following:

Basics:

30 boxes cereal

60 1lt cartons of milk

16 sleeves of spaghetti

4 packages of spiral pasta

30 cans of pasta sauce

3 jars of pesto

4 boxes of cous cous

100 cans of assorted vegetables

20 cans of soup

20 cans of coconut milk
4 bottles of lime juice

10 cans of olives

5 bags of rice

3 packs of sun dried tomatoes
4 bags of flour
Large assortment of spices and curry paste
Large assortment of condiments for fish marinades

2 jars of minced garlic

60 boxes of Kraft dinner

5 boxes of pancake mix

5 bottles of syrup

30 packets of instant oats

60 packets of ramen noodles

40 cans of tuna

3 cans of crab meat

200 assorted flavour tea bags

1 cake mix with icing - for Mike's b-day

1 peanut butter cookie mix4 jars of instant coffee
3 bags of raw sugar
2 boxes of sweet and low sachets
4 bottles of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and relish
2 bottles of soy sauce
6 taco dinner kits
5 packs of tortillas
10 packs of sandwich wraps
5 jars of pickles

2 cans of Pam non stick spray

4 bottles of olive oil

4 boxes of laundry detergent
Countless sponges and bottles of bleach and cleaning products
50 garbage bags
3 rolls of cling wrap and aluminium foil

15 rolls of paper towel

100 rolls of toilet paper

4 boxes of matches

Snacks:

6 boxes of granola bars

16 packets of oreos

6 jars of peanuts

4 boxes of raisins

16 boxes of crackers

16 cans of pringles

10 jars of salsa

10 bags of nachos

10 jars of nutella

10 packets of jello

Drinks:

8 cases of beer

3 cases of Gatorade

10 cases of coke zero

30 1ltr cartons of assorted juice

24 bottles of wine

2 bottles of rum

Fresh:

24 beef patties

12 chicken breasts

10 packs of sausages

10 packs of hot dogs

2 packs of bacon

5 containers of deli meat

4 kg of minced beef (the butcher vacuum packed all our meat)

2 bags of onions

2 bags of potatoes

2 bags of carrots

1 tray of green peppers

3 trays of tomatoes

4 heads of lettuce

10 bananas

1 pineapple

1 rock melon

1 tray of kiwi fruit

3 dozen eggs

2 heads of cabbage

10 bricks of assorted cheese

7 jars of feta

4 tubs of yogurt

4 packets of butter

24 hamburger buns

Next was finding a place to store everything. Good thing Lazy has A LOT of storage space!

In between the shopping, we spent a lot of time looking for a potential crew member to join us from Panama to the Marqueses - a 6 week commitment at the very least. The hope was to have an additional person to help ease our 4 hour watch system so that we would be more rested. We found a nice guy from Chicago but after a 4 day stint with him in the Las Perlas archipelago, we decided the fit wasn't right and that we would be more comfortable doing the trip solo.

Mike was also super busy working on a few boat projects. Even in a city the size of Panama with all of the boat traffic, spare parts were hard to come by so we enlisted the help of Marine Warehouse (marine warehouse.net) and had 2 new toilet pumps and a VHF radio with built in AIS (Standard Horizon GX2500) shipped in from the USA.

Our depth and wind instruments also failed on the trip back from Las Perlas but we were lucky enough to find a Raymarine dealer who had a new joint in stock which fixed the problem. (Mike: T-joint in sea talk NG cabling connecting transducer to the sea talk backbone had become corroded and all data in the system was being corrupted, but a new joint solved what might have been a big problem!)

After being in and out of the lack luster anchorages of Panama City for two weeks, we were ready to head off and enjoy a few more days in Las Perlas with our buddy boats.  We had experienced some great fishing and spear fishing on our first visit to Las Perlas, and weren't disappointed the 2nd time - again catching some lovely fish!

The Las Perlas islands are a really fantastic cruising ground - it was lovely to find isolated anchorages that were basically untouched.  

We had heard that there was a bay in the anchorage of Isla Esperitu Santu that was popular for catamarans to 'dry out' - a process whereby you enter at high tide, tie the bow of the boat off to the mangroves, set a stern anchor and wait for the tide to drop, with the end result being a free haul out. Lazy was fitted with 2 smallish 2-blade propellers and Charles from Chilli Cat had a spare pair of props (same size, but greater pitch), which would increase our motoring speed significantly at reduced RPMs - hopefully reducing our fuel usage.  So, we decided to dry out, scrub down the anti-foul, barnacles, sand back & re-paint the sail drives (existing anti-foul wasn't working) and replace the propellers - all of which was much easier to do out of the water.

With approximately 5m of tidal change, we dried out on the afternoon tide.  With 6 hours of sunlight, we had an army of friends from our buddy boats help us to scrub away all the gunk that had latched onto the boat in the rich waters off Panama, change the propellers and generally clean up.  Of course, no army works for free ... payment in stubby's of beer was in order! We enjoyed our last night on a secluded beach at Isla Canas before heading off on our 8 day journey to the Galapagos!