At the end of August we sailed to Shelter Bay where we planned to leave our boat for 2 months to take a little break and go visit friends and family. Just before entering the breakwater of the bay, we found ourselves in one of the worst lightning storms of our voyage so far. It felt like we were surrounded by lightning and it rained so hard we couldn’t see out of our window anymore. The counts between lightning and thunder were very few to none. Luckily, the kids didn’t get scared (but the adults did!!!) and kept playing with the four of them, every now and then exchanging some eye-contact with us to make sure this all was normal. Which it wasn’t, but luckily, it didn’t last too long.
We decided to slow the boat down, hoping the thunderstorm would pass us. After a while the weather got better and we were ready to enter the breakwater. During a short VHF-contact with the Cristobal Signal Station (station managing the entrance of the Panama Canal), we got told not to try and cross any ships at the bow and to wait our turn to safely cross the channel behind a boat. Our arrival in the marina was very smooth and the dockmaster and marineros did a perfect job at helping us mooring the boat. The time had come to say goodbye to Anne, Moritz, Leila and Lino, whom we’d spent some amazing weeks with.
After a week of packing up our boat, cleaning and getting a few boat-projects done, it was time for us to head to the airport and take our flight.
