The San Blas Islands Experience: from S'mores to Cuttle Fish

News from Alan on Monday (2/22) evening:

"It was a full day for us on the boat with copious amounts of swimming, napping and relaxing. As it was not very windy today, everything heated quickly when the sun came up. I went for short swim right away.

A fellow cruiser we'd met --about our age and on his way through the canal-- rowed his dinghy over to chat. He has been through the San Blas Islands previously, so he knew some good sailing areas. He gave us the waypoint coordinates of some recommended sites.

Later, [~ 10:00 am] we picked up anchor and motored out of the small anchorage we were in --a spot between about 4 islands [the Coco Banderos Cays]. After motoring about 2 hours we reached another set of small beautiful islands [the Dutch Cays] that looked very much the same as the last ones. : )

Small beautiful islands with sandy beaches is the common theme in the San Blas.

After we anchored, I went for a snorkel to see what might be nearby. We were anchored in about 30 feet of water but I was able to reach the anchor to check it with just mask, fins and snorkel. The anchor was securly buried in sand where it should be. From there I snorkeled over to a big coral head.

I heard recently that you need a "tickle stick" to coax lobster from their hiding places in the rock crevasses. So when I spotted about 3 lobster in a hole I found a stick and gave it a go. It totally worked. You just rub their bellies and they walk right out as if saying "What is going on? Why am I doing this"? They walked out so far that it would have been easy to sneak a net in behind them --in preparation for their jump backwards which is the move that makes them so hard to catch. The ones I coaxed out turned out to be quite small, but the concept was proved. Now I know.

Back on the boat, Adam and Trevor were cooking some chicken salad: canned chicken, red pepper, mayo, garlic, onion. We ate it all up with the last of our fresh bread.

Soon after we were all asleep with music playing and the sun beating down --I in the cockpit under the sun shade, Adam in the settee, Trevor in the V-berth. I got up every few minutes to pour water on the deck of the boat with our canvas bucket to keep the decks cool and keep the boat from getting too hot down below. This works well but it is labor intensive. The downside of having a teak deck is that the dark wood makes the decks very hot in strong sunlight.

Right off our transom a school of about a dozen tiny little cuttle fish hovered. They were green and yellow and blue -ish and kind of silvery. They just hovered there all facing the same way occasionally spreading their little tentacles out sideways. They were only a couple of inches long. The biggest --maybe 3 inches.

When I dropped the canvas bucket in the water they all squirted black ink at it, shot about 3 feet away, and turned bright white before going back to normal colors and swimming away. Didn't see them again after that. Very cool.

Eventually, food coma wore off. I took the dinghy snorkeling again armed with our small net, my mesh bag, and my newly found "tickle stick" (reminded me of that bamboo back scratcher that my grandmom has).

I found a sweet snorkeling spot right in the middle of the anchorage. There were tons of large coral heads all around peaking about 8 feet down, with drop-offs to about 40 feet all around them, and with coral trailing off into the deeper water. Brain coral, fan coral, yellow, green, red, huge coral formations and tons of fish. Sometimes 20 fish in one spot and no two the same kind. I saw a sandy white flounder skimming the bottom, giant star fish of all colors. No lobster, of course, because I was looking for them and they knew it. Oh well.

I returned to the boat around 3pm. Trevor was ready to join in on the snorkeling. We rowed the dinghy out toward the breakers on the north side of the the island group toward a wrecked fiberglass sailboat we had seen coming in earlier today. It has been there quite a while according to the graffiti on the bottom of the hull. It was turned on its side in about a foot of water inside the breakers. It was mostly intact but broken open and completely gutted of everything but the bare fiberglass hull and deck.

[Within the Dutch Cays] our anchorage is near a small fishing village on a small island that the Kuna indians use. From our boat we can see lots of small huts made of palm trees on this island. The Kuna fisherman come out to live in the outer islands and fish for a month at a time. They are very nice, friendly, and happy to talk to us. Most of them know spanish pretty well (which they are taught in school) and of course Kuna.

We rowed around to the small fishing village island. We were hoping to make contact to see if they had fish they would trade with us. Trevor had brought a bag of gummy worms for exactly this purpose. As we came closer, Trevor yelled a hello and we drifted toward their beach.

Trevor asked if they had fish. They said they did. He asked if they would want to trade and apologized that we only had candy. We felt a little bad because we didn't know if they wanted candy or not. They said they would be interested, and so we landed. They helped us pull the dinghy up on the sand. The Kuna we have seen are extremely short people. I read they are possibly the shortest people apart from the Pigmys in Africa and that they and their culture may be the closest to the pre-colombian inhabitants of Central America.... before the Spanish and European conquests.

Most of our conversation was with a fisherman who spoke pretty good spanish and wore a black speedo. There were a couple of other men there, a woman in a hut cooking rice, and a small kid 5 or 6 years old. Close by there were dogs and chickens and an enormous pile of coconuts. They told us they would live at this site for one month before going "home" and that they had been there for 2 weeks already.

After a somewhat shy and awkward exchange we were shown their fish which looked good. They had a whole bucket of them gutted ready to cook. We traded one medium-sized bag of sour gummy worms for 3 medium-sized fish. Success!

With our booty we rowed back in the dinghy to prepare the grill.


Yes thats right; we now have a GRILL. Trevor and I went in half and half on it. Got it for 40 bucks in Cartagena. It is a like-new stainless steel round grill that bolts to the stern railing and used propane or charcoal. Adam was not interested in chipping in for the grill at the time of purchase but after dinner tonight it was clear that it is worth every penny, maybe more.

We grilled eggplant, onion, tomato, and red peppers in a vinegar sauce in a big aluminum foil "boat" over hardwood charcoal purchased in Cartagena. We grilled the fish (small red-snapper-looking fish), grilled and served whole. Then we dined on grilled vegetables and fish. SOOOO GOOOOOD.

But the coals were still hot. Hmmmm.... S'MORES! I remembered we had the s'mores kit that Aunt Jeanne gave me. The oh-so-delicious s'mores desert comprised graham crackers, marshmellows, milk chocolate with almonds!!! Holy cow. We were in heaven. We figured we must have been the only people eating s'mores at that moment within 100 miles.

Better yet, we have enough s'mores supplies in the kit for another s'mores night down the road next time we grill. Soon, I hope.

And if that were not enough, the grill was still hot. It would be a shame to waste the fuel so we cut up our large pineapple (one of the last fruits we have from Cartagena) and grilled large pineapple slices, too! AHHHH SOOO GOOD! Then Adam was still hungry so he made some rice.

While we were grilling, we saw two Kuna fisherman in a dugout canoe fishing nearby. I couldn't believe how they were doing it: nothing but some fishing line with a hook on the end. I don't know if they were using bait, but it seemed like they would just throw the hook and line out and then pull it back in (all by hand) sometimes jerking the line and one final big jerk at the end. Then if nothing, they threw it back out again. They did this extremely fast, casting a dozen or more times in a minute. I saw one fisherman pull in 3 fish in a row one after the other. They were small fish (2 or 3 inches) but perfect to use as bait for larger fish. Very cool. I want to try this method tomorrow.

Sunday I took a picture of two large (3 foot long) sucker fish latched onto the bottom of our hull. They were dark grey and just chilling upside down sucking on our keel.

Who knows what we will see next.