Pitufa.at

The approach to the harbour of Rikitea on the main island of the Gambier archipelago was a bit more exciting than we’d have hoped for being exhausted after 24 days at sea. The wind gusted up to 30 knots when we approached the pass through the outer reef (the archipelago is surrounded by a huge diamond-shaped reef, 20 miles diameter). We had to motor right… Continue reading »

We’re still having a good time on Isabela. Yesterday we joined a hiking group and spent 5 hours walking past the gigantic 10 km wide crater of the volcano Sierra Negra and through the caldera of Volcano Chico with impressive lava tunnels and flows of different ages and colours giving evidence of the stages in which plants manage to settle on the craggy inhospitable volcanic… Continue reading »

We’ve had quite an eventful week with my Dad, visited the old town centre, sailed over to Taboga and back, took a “Diablo Rojo” (a local bus, crammed full with people loud music hammering down) to the 16th century ruins of Panama viejo as an adventure trip, visited the Miraflores locks and took a walk in the Parque natural metropolitano. Today my Dad flies back… Continue reading »

We finished all our electronics projects in time before my father arrived last Tuesday. Since then we’ve been doing touristy things (sightseeing in the casco viejo, strolling through town)–nice after two weeks of constant work. Unfortunately the sea is very murky at the moment, lots of tiny creatures are around, sometimes bright red clouds drift through, at night they fluoresce spectacularly like bright turquoise fireworks… Continue reading »

Unfortunately our time in the Perlas is coming to an end, we really liked this archipelago. We’ve returned to the northern island of Contadora to clean the barnacles off the hull and to wait for favourable winds to sail back to Panama City.

We enjoyed the last few days in the calm anchorage behind the little island Espiritu Santo. We circumnavigated the island by dinghy, beached it on a powdersugar-white beach on the eastside and walked out to a little islet that is connected with the island during low tide. Due to the enormous tidal range (at spring tide like now it’s more than 4 metres) the landscapes… Continue reading »

In the bay south of Contadora where we’re anchored now we get daily entertainment: in the mornings and in the afternoons big schools of stingrays (medium sized devil rays) round up shoals of small fish and then a special spectacle starts: first the tips of their wings are visible on the surface, then the water seems to boil when the small fish are herded to… Continue reading »

Yesterday Roswitha left us again, she took the ferry from Contadora back to Panama City (quite an adventerous device, ferry guests have to wade into the sea, climb on a boat which then takes them out to the ferry ) and is now sitting on the plane to New York, then on to Frankfurt and then follows yet another flight to Salzburg… We had a… Continue reading »

The last few days we’ve been terribly busy mounting new solar panels, running through chandleries, buying provisioning–something seems to be weird with the time in Panama, it flies by and the days are never long enough for everything we want to do. Today Christian’s sister arrived and we have a good excuse to have a break and spend some days off swimming (last time we… Continue reading »

This year we didn’t get into a christmassy mood at all–Panama’s just too tropical for our associations of snow, red noses and stiff half-frozen fingers holding on to mugs of mulled wine… We’ll make an effort today by baking Christmas cookies, if that doesn’t help we’ll start singing carols We’ll spend a quiet Christmas eve aboard Pitufa, and maybe it’ll be cool enough in the… Continue reading »