Fabien sends a taxi to pick us up from the hostel. We have to wait a few hours in the Club Nautico before embarkation. Today, it’s going to happen… my excitement has been stirred up like cappuccino foam for the last couple of days, and I do feel really good. It will be six days until we’ll arrive in Panama City and I’ll be able to update this monologue.
At least, that’s what I thought. Fabien brings our passports to the port captain who has to take care of immigration. We can leave only by his mercy. If we don’t get the passports back until 6pm, we have to sleep on the boat because sailing out at nighttime will make us marine novices prone to sea-sickness. We hang around, I join Fabien to a big supermarket where he buys the stuff for our trip. Seven people can eat a lot in six days. By the way, the supermarket looks exactly like what I’m used to in Western Europe and the civilized part of Northern America, with two exceptions:
1) There are security guards that check your bags when you leave the shop;
2) There are employees to help you put everything in bags and say “buenos dias” to you, with a friendly smile.
We have everything packed in Fabien’s small car and drive back to the boat. The preparations for such a sailing tour are extensive. It’s a lot of work to maintain a self-sustaining boat. And this is, in my case, a good opportunity to reflect about autonomy, independence, and the like.
At night, we feast on a huge pizza, provided for by Fabien our ever cooler captain, and then retreat to our boat to spend a beautiful night under the stars. Doing these things for the first time, it makes us all excited about the marine life we are going to experience in the week to come.