Today, we sailed with engines in almost only glassy sea to Puerto di Carti. About Puerto di Carti I need to say that there are several dwellings with the same name. I identified one place using Google maps. The structure I saw in Google Maps matched with what I saw in the Navionics map. That there is more than one Puerto di Carti, we learned already yesterday in phone calls from Carlos, “my” taxi driver from Panama City.

About 2 month ago, Carlos answered a related question that he drives with a mini bus 7 people, luggage, and provision to Puerto di Carti. Yesterday, he declined to go to Puerto di Carti to pick up friends who need to go to the airport in Panama City, because he might lose his taxi license. This, because Puerto di Carti is part of Guna Yala, the land of the Guna, with special privileges. I most likely have to give up the idea of having friends brought to and picked up to Puerto di Carti. Needs a bit more investigations.

Food provisioning is not possible. Some basic food only is available. Thus, provisioning is best made in Panama City. This also matches statements of other sailors. As an emergency it could be possible to go by private car from Linton Bay Marina to Sabatinas, where the is a smaller Rey supermarket. The privat car I know its cheaper than a taxi. It might cost maybe 40 – 50 USD.

From there we headed north to the Lemon Cays (I used this name before and I should have used “Eastern Lemon Cays” they are NE of the Lemon Cays.) We tried to inside through 3 possible channels from the W of the group of islands. But gave up. The water depths seems not to be deep enough. There were 3 cats to be seen inside, most likely cats with dagger board keeps or those with almost no keels this cannot sail high into the wind like MaRe. She has a draft of 1.3 m and sails 35 deg close hauled and still makes good speed.

We used for the approach the Bauhaus Panama guide, which normally is good but here I gave up for safety reasons. The Navionics charts are extremely poor quality in general. Based on my experience they don’t improve their charts at all except publishing comments of other sailors. In the Bocas del Toro, there is even a rather big white area marked “UNSURVEYED” in a map i just bought a year ago. They don’t bothers to get get even the information of the Bauhaus Panama Guide into their maps. Buying updates of Navionics maps simply doesn’t make sense; but once and keep for the next 10 years. It’s time for OpenSeaMaps. I will have a look how I can contribute to this project. (I already use OpenStreetMaps.)

Yesterday when we approached a possible channel by staying clear of breaking wave areas, we had between 5 – 10m of water under MaRe but sailed in far inside an area, which is indicated as -30 cm – 0 cm.

We then decided to drop the anchor outside the Lemon Cays at 7 – 8 m of water into sandy ground. It’s a bit a rolly anchorage but a cat does not really roll, but swings a bit. Not uncomfortable at all.

The moment we completed anchoring, a tender with a group of young local men came to see if we have any kind of problems. They offered us to guide us through the possible entrance channels but I kindly rejected. They mention there is always 2 m of water. This for me is a NO-GO depth. They confirmed that our anchorage is safe only a bit “yole yole” (guna language for wiggle, wobble, shaking…) Tomorrow we will go into the Cays using our tender.