The Buses of Colon

Colon Panama is a scary place. A place that you would not even consider walking around with your guard down or after dark. There are areas that are extremely unfriendly to outsiders. The poverty is apparent, the living conditions are terrible. Amidst all of this are the Buses of Colon. They jump out at you and provide color to an other wise dreary landscape. They are expressions of the creativity and the driver’s personality. They display graffiti as art.

Walking around Colon I am escorted by a 250 pound taxi driver that seems to know everyone. I am paying him to watch my back as I try to capture the contrast between the depressing gritty feel of Colon living and the colorful upbeat buses.

As we leave Vatican City (in Colon) he decides to tell me that on the same basketball court I was taking pictures two people where killed the night before. Time to move on....

Check out the pictures by clicking on the "The Buses of Colon" to your left.

Panama

The Panama Canal....

We are curretnly docked at Shelter Bay Marina. Shelter Bay Marina is the new alternative to docking or anchoring near Colon Panama while waiting to transit the PC.

Located only a few miles across the the harbor from Colon it is a completely different world than the dangerous, dirty, decrepid streets of Colon and the Panama Canal Yacht Club.

We are staged to begin our South Pacific Sailing. We have sailed 9000 miles aboard Vivid in the last 11 months. Lot's of miles, experiences, and learnings.

Before we tranist the canal we will sail the San Blas Islands, home to the Kuna Indians. The smallest human beings - I think tied to the pygmees. I can relate to them as I was always the shortest kid in my class.

This will be my second transit of the Panama Canal the first being 5 years ago aboard a 55 foot sailboat. It's an advantage having been here before. You know what to expect interms of the admisitrative hoops and requirements for tranisitg. This time we hire an agent, Panama Agencies. They are invaluable to assisiting with all fo the logistics. This frees me up to focus on the yacht and the details of the owners trip.

Global Warming

Kangerlua has been a Unesco World Heritage site since 2004, the bay's mouth is filled with bergs the size of apartment blocks or whole towns. There's no sight more mesmerizing than gazing upon these monsters and listening to the thunderclap roars when they fissure or explode under the heat of the summer sun. Here the effects of global warming are evident. The ice is melting and receding faster than ever according to the locals.

We've learned that this glacier has receded almost one mile in ten years. In ten more years it could be gone. We have also learned that we are one of only four private yachts that have made the trek to Greenland this year. More importantly we learn that only three are leaving...this glacier claimed a French sailboat a few days earlier. Apparently they where to close to it when it calved, and it sunk the yacht and miraculously all crew where rescued by a nearby local fishing vessel.

At anchor tonight we keep a 24 hour anchor watch to fend off growlers and floating bergs by the boat. We keep a long fiberglass telescopic pole that I bought at Home Depot on deck for fending off the ice. When I get up I can see it's time to go as the ice is getting much thicker.

Our original change of itineraries has now put us at the end of the safe cruising season in Greenland and 900 miles north of Cape Farvel. Cape Farvel can be like Cape Horn. Essentially we have missed our seasonal weather window to continue on to Iceland, England, and on into the Mediterranean. The issue is the frequency of the very strong lows that come sweeping across from Labrador and Canada. This time of year the break between systems is only about 24 hours. So after consulting with the owner and our Commanders Weather www.commandersweather.com/ we decide to head back via the Labrador Coast, and retrace our steps back to the USA. Someone made the Greenland cruising and Climbing Mt Everest analogy to me, they said getting to the top is one thing and getting down and out is another.
So we sit and wait out a few cold 50 knot gales and look for our weather window.

Sled Dogs

We have a day off and are trekking for the Kangerlua Glacier. Walking through town we pass through a long rocky valley that is essentially a large dog kennel during the summer months. It is unsettling and disturbing. Here the "working" dogs are kept until the winter. It is a very eerie sound when a thousand dos start howling at the same time. When they howl you can feel their pain. I have learned that hundreds of animal protection organizations in more than 58 countries have started campaigns to help the sled dogs of Greenland which are being neglected and abused. I took the time to sign several online petitions and made a donation to the effort. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/GreenlandSledDogs/

Illulissat

Heading for Illulissat we have been weaving in and out of the big icebergs like a kick off re turner dogging tacklers as he tries to break for daylight, eyes focused on the opposing teams endzone. We are 3 miles from the entrance and all I can see is a solid white wall from horizon to horizon. The radar screen reflects the challenge ahead. I back her down as we approach the ice wall between us and our destination. the next three miles will take us three hours. It is a tedious process of finding a path through the ice maze

Disko Bay

Disko Bay is amazing. We arrive in the bay in the fog at 0430. I have been weaving in and of house size icebergs seen only on radar for the past two hours. As the fog lifts I can see the Goliath iceberg I am rounding giving it a 100 yard berth, I make my turn towards the island we will anchor.
We make our approach into the entrance of the island in dead fog. I see the water on the depth gauge go shallow fast and I bring the boat to a stop. In this case enough to put us in an area of rock pinnacles. No way out but by brail, I station Lisa on the starboard side and Gordon (our Chef) on Port Side. The water is so clear that you can see the rock heads. The posts are my feelers, and eyes for the next 30 minutes they tell me right or left , using the thruster and the engine we slither out of the potential danger. We will later discover an error in our GPS Datum and the Chart Datum for the area that shows us on our electronic charts about 100 yards off.
We anchor the yacht in the most amazing setting. We are completely alone. Not a man made sound to be heard. The silence is deafening. Looking out through the entrance to our anchorage you see a steady parade of the gigantic ice structures that we came this far to see. We are at Latitude 69 N. At this Latitude it is day light nearly 24 hours a day.
We go ashore and explore an abandoned fishing village. We see the tilting racks that were once used to dry cod, we walk through an abandoned school house, and hike to the top of the hill to over look Disko Bay.. The sight is spectacular. The bay is covered by the newly calved very large icebergs. Seeing this sight I can put into perspective what I navigated through in the fog using only radar.
We are headed for Illuisat the only harbor in Disko Bay. The greatest tourist attraction in all of Greenland is the jaw-dropping Ilulissat Kangerlua (Ilulissat Icefjord), a berg-packed bay fed by the 3mi wide and 3608ft thick glacier Sermeq Kujalleq. The glacier flows an average of 82ft daily and it is the world's most prolific outside Antarctica.

Inuit

As we tie up we rig our lines and fenders against the very industrial pier to accommodate the 20 foot tidal swing. We eagerly head out to explore Greenland's "largest" city. The roads do not go further the five miles fro the center of town. It takes us about 30 minutes to go from one side of town to the other. In the winter Dog Sleds are the preferred mode of transportation. Now in the Summer months the dogs are basically tied to rocks and fed dried cod for the summer months. It's a sad sight for a dog lover like my self. But I am told that these are "working: dogs are not pets and that is different.
Their are two groups the indigenous Inuit Indians and the Dutch professionals that are their working in various businesses. The Inuit (Eskimo like) have a very weathered look to them. These are a people that live off the land. They need very little to get by. Their primary source of income is from hunting and fishing. They hunt seals from their boats with rifles. A seals head pops up and you here a rifle shot. The seals skins are sold and the meat is eaten. http://www.wbur.org/special/dispatches/greenland/inuit/