I gotta tell you, this new ocean has not given us the gentlest introduction to her ways!

We left Shelter Bay Marina and were greeted with sloppy, lumpy, gusty nonsense at the breakwater. This — compounded with the continuous stream of ships coming & going through the breakwater — made for a bit of a rough start. After 5 hours we’d made it exactly 10 miles (woo-hoo!), the boat was leaking, bean salad wasn’t sitting too well, we all had salty butts, and spirits were a little low… so we put aside our initial plan of sailing straight to the San Blas and anchored at “Naranjo” instead 🙂

Naranjo turned out to be a beautiful stop — a flat calm anchorage in 15′ of water, great beach for a bonfire (no marshmallows though — that’s a Leah fail!!), and the whole place to ourselves 🙂

While we’re still getting to know the great Caribbean (and waiting for a better weather window for Providencia), we’re taking it pretty easy… we had another short 12-mile hop to Portobelo, a few days of relaxation and Fort exploration, the sad end of Bill’s visit to Brio, and some serious 4200 application (our toerail continues to leak like a sieve — even on these short day trips!)… so all in all, a nice change of pace!

I’m not very good at the whole self-timer thing yet, so sorry for the lack of focus here!!

Jon enjoyed conquering the cannons

Despite the daily afternoon rains, Portobelo is a very beautiful place!!

And I think cashew trees are pretty cool, even if you can’t eat them!

We’re headed for the San Blas islands now (where there is no internet!) so it may be a while before any more Brio updates are posted. Fingers are crossed we’ll get our Providencia window sometime near the end of the week — just long enough to give us a few days in the gin-clear waters of the San Blas 🙂

– LMK