We are sailing again!
Our first stop after departing the Vista Mar marina in San Carlos was to be Isla Bona. Bona is a small, uninhabited island with a little cove providing protection from the season’s northerly winds. We’d heard that a Japanese company once operated here, either dredging sand or harvesting guano, but abandoned the operation. Jungle and rust are fast devouring what remains.
There were two ratty fishing boats anchored in a cove only big enough for them. The men aboard momentarily paused what they were doing and watched us pass through, half-heartedly waving when we stared.
Instead, we anchored a mile away, behind Isla Otoque. This island is inhabited, but not near us. Thick jungle isolates the beach near us. We’d seen one of the villages in passing, and while colorfully painted, it is not a tourist destination. The indigenous people that once lived on these islands were said to have put up a hell of a fight against the Spanish, but all that remains of them might be the strange names for these islands.
Take a couple minutes to enjoy our short video about Otoque.
We rested for a couple nights anchored there before sailing 30 miles to the east, across the inbound and outbound shipping lanes of the Panama Canal, to a group of islands known as Las Perlas (the Pearls).
It had been over 4 months since we’d sailed, having spent 2 months in the US and 2 months at a dock. Once the sails were full of wind, the bow slicing through the sea, we were back in the groove.
Las Perlas get their name from the Spanish who discovered an abundance of pearls. They brought in slaves to harvest them. The descendants of the slaves are now the primary inhabitants of the islands, although some have been developed into tourist destinations from Panama City.
There were reasons to avoid Las Perlas, as their reputation has been recently marred within the sailing community. In 2023, two sailboats were assaulted and robbed in the vicinity of San Miguel, a small village on the north side of Isla del Rey, the largest of the islands. Cruisers were advised either to stay clear of the islands, or keep 10 miles away from San Miguel - a radius that covers most of the archipelago.
The report of this first assault in February 2023:
A yacht anchored alone off Isla del Rey on Isla de Espiritu Santo was boarded by 3 men armed with guns at about 2000HRS, on February 9, 2023. The crew was made to lie face down in the cockpit with guns to their heads while the yacht was thoroughly ransacked, and everything stolen. The radio was disabled before they departed.
The second assault in March 2023
…a cruising [sailboat] with 4 persons onboard anchored in Las Perlas at about 1100HRS. No other boats were nearby. Just after dark, four black, young, Spanish-speaking men armed with guns and machetes boarded from a quiet (paddled) but motorized panga. One crew member took the handheld VHF and locked themselves into the head, and activated DSC. The door was immediately broken down, the radio silenced and taken from the crew. One crew member was hit over the head and back with a pistol and all were made to lie on the floor at gunpoint while the yacht was aggressively ransacked. Much damage was done to the yacht’s interior cabinets, doors, and drawers. The cables to the radios and autopilot display were cut.
The thieves were onboard for approximately 1.5 hours and stole cash, wallets, electronics, phones, jewelry, foul weather gear, lifejackets, clothing, alcohol and fuel jugs containing gasoline.
The dog was missing and presumed to have been pushed overboard or taken
While we tackled boat projects at the Vista Mar marina, we befriended many crews coming and going, and the subject of the Las Perlas assaults was often brought up - they’re one of the few worthwhile cruising destinations in the Gulf of Panama.
Several crews we met were coming and going to Las Perlas, and said they stayed in the northerly islands and only anchored around other boats. As far as we knew, the pirates were still at large.
The northernmost islands have hotels and resorts and are frequented by vacationers boating or flying in from Panama City, so we decided we’d head there, where many other boats would be present.
We anchored off the southeast corner Isla Chapela in clear turquoise water. It was a beautiful spot, but on the weekend, chartered boats brought in tourists and crowded the small anchorage.
One day, while looking at a map of nearby islands, I messaged the Vista Mar WhatsApp group, asking if Isla Pedro Gonzalez was safe.
Someone responded, saying they were part of a buddy-boat fleet going around Isla del Rey, and that we were welcome to join the 4 yachts on their trip. An hour later, we set sail to catch up with the fleet, who would be weighing anchor about the time we showed up. We’d follow them to the next planned anchorage.
We’d turned off Starlink, our satellite Internet system, to avoid their expensive maritime pricing. Once the sails were hoisted and the course was set, we put a trolling line out and caught a sierra mackerel.
When we got into radio range of the fleet, they hailed us on the radio and advised that they’d been approached by a panga with men that were behaving suspiciously, asking lots of questions about where the yachts were going while eyeballing the boats. One of the cruisers made the mistake of telling the men where the fleet was headed.
Because of that indiscretion, instead of going to the next planned anchorage, the fleet had decided to sail all the way to the south side of Isla del Rey, putting over 16 miles between them and the suspicious panga. We can’t really say they fit the description, because “young, black, Panamanian males” describes every fishing boat we saw in the islands.
With anchors aweigh, our group of 5 sailboats ventured off, some flying spinnakers - big colorful sails for catching light winds. At its peak, the fleet consisted of Miette and SV Whirlwind (American), SV Pathfinder (French and American), SV Ora (French), SV Galatea (Americans with Panamanian residency).
We dropped anchor in a small cove where Rio Cacique, a small jungle river, meets the Pacific Ocean. Since we were on the south side of Isla del Rey, we’d be well protected from the prevailing northerly winds, and only have to endure a moderate swell from the south.
Not more than an hour after the fleet had their anchors set, a panga with 4 young men approached rapidly. I saw them at a distance and grabbed the VHF radio, “attention fleet - panga alert. Repeat, panga inbound.”
In all of our cruising, we have never once been nervous or suspicious about incoming pangas, as every exchange we’ve had with locals has been friendly, from Mexico all the way to Panama. Wanting to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I disliked having to fear for our safety and distrust the people of Las Perlas.
The panga stopped at one yacht. A minute passed. Another boat hailed them on the VHF. “Checking in with you - is everything alright?”
“Yeah, it’s all good. They want to sell bananas and papayas.”
The panga made the rounds and sold their fruit. They only had a papaya left by the time they reached Miette, but we already had one in the fridge. They said they’d be back the next day with Bananas. “Banana Mañana”
Only one of the men spoke, and he was oddly loud. He either had a speech impediment, or they speak a different flavor of Spanish than I’ve heard before, replacing s sounds with sh. I never have a problem being understood, but there was a moment of confusion.
“Do you understand me? Do you speak Spanish or another language?” I asked. One of the men in the boat laughed, and confirmed, “Spanish.”
The following day, we went along with the crews of Ora, Pathfinder, and Whirlwind to do a jungle cruises up the river by dinghy, thoroughly locking up Miette before we left.
Incredibly, people live out in these mangroves, and a couple of their dogs swam out into the river to greet us.
I’ve seen Apocalypse Now more than a healthy amount of times, replaying scenes as we motored up the murky jungle river. “Oh he’s out there. He’s really out there.”
Our next stop was a tiny nearby island, Isla Cacique, with a small white sand beach that disappears at high tide. We dropped anchor and swam to shore.
The kids of SV Whirlwind had fun catching a dozen hermit crabs and building a sand castle for them while Shawn walked around looking for shells and I made field recordings of bird song and surf.
It was a comfortable night there, and the next morning the fleet sailed west for Isla San Jose. This island is the second-largest after Isla del Rey.
In the 1940s, the US used the island to test chemical weapons. A decade or so later, the island was bought by Earl Tupper, who founded the Tupperware company. Currently, George Novey owns the majority of the island now. Novey owns the department stores bearing his name, and Air Panama, but there a few privately owned resorts on separate plots.
Ashore, we found a gravel road, and walked it until the sound of a distant truck turned us back.
A low-pressure system rolled through southwest of us, and while we didn’t directly see any of the bad weather, the sea was disturbed. The winds of a storm might die quickly, but the waves generated can last for days. Big, nasty swells came into the anchorage, rolling Miette and the other monohulls uncomfortably hard. Nobody got much sleep that night except the catamaran crews.
Whirlwind wanted to stay another night, and for a while, the fleet reluctantly decided to hang around. But when the southerly swell got even worse by mid-afternoon, violently rocking us side to side, I radioed the fleet to say that Miette had had enough of this, and was sailing for Isla Pedro Gonzalez to the north. Minutes later, Galatea radioed to say they’d be right behind us!
On our way, we saw many rays jumping and flipping out of the sea, and one lone whale shark.
The anchorage at Isla Pedro Gonzalez wasn’t great, not offering much protection from the northerly winds, but it was flat-calm for the moment. Shawn was getting her paddleboard down, so I asked her to paddle over to the sailboat next to us, SV Rumi, to get the lay of the land. It turns out the skipper, a young surfer and marine electrician, had only just arrived and didn’t know any more than we did.
We slept soundly that night, and the fleet caught up with us the following day. Shawn and I went ashore, since the map showed a road going through the jungle to a small village.
It wasn’t long before we came to a security hut and were told by two uniformed men that we had to turn back, that this was private property. I apologized and said we were looking for a way to get to the village. They said this was not the road to the village, and that we’d have to turn back. Their shirts said Pearl Island, which is apparently the name of the resort development. We obliged, and then 5 minutes later, a truck came out to us, driven by two different, masked security guards in wrap-around shades, wearing the same uniform. Again, we said we arrived by sailboat and were just trying to get to the village.
The men said we were to leave immediately, that this road and this land around us is all private property. As we walked back to the beach where we’d landed, the truck crept along following us most of the way. Once we rowed off the beach, another security guard appeared out of the tree line, watching until we were on our boats.
I later learned that this island was essentially sold out from under the feet of the people who’d lived here for generations. Imagine living on the island of your great grandparents, waking up one morning to be told that this land now belongs to someone else. Some locals resisted, and were forcibly removed at gunpoint, while the rest were intimidated into retreating to the small village on the north side of the island. Locals found cultivating crops outside of the bounds of the village were arrested. The culprits behind this land grab are one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Panama. Using political connections, they bought the island for just $40,000, which they are re-branding as Pearl Island. An expose uncovering the shady deal and mistreatment of the locals was published just a few years ago, and sad interviews with locals can be found on YouTube. It could be that the GoPro camera strapped to my backpack straps made the guards suspicious of our intention.
That night, winds kicked up out of the North, and just about bed time, we realized that our anchorage was no longer tenable.
We spent a half hour in the moonless dark and howling wind, slowly motoring around the small cove looking for a different place to anchor, but with a tidal range of nearly 16 feet (5 meters) and a lot of rocky bottom, we made the difficult choice to head to a different island in the dead of night and in a pitching sea.
Isla Viveros might normally be a great place for cruisers to stop, but it’s very close to the village of San Miguel, where the pirates are believed to live. Once we were in the lee of Viveros, the water was flat and we enjoyed a deep sleep.
At first light, we weighed anchor and began putting distance between ourselves and San Miguel.
We saw a French-flagged yacht anchored in bay behind Isla Ampón, and figuring there was safety in numbers and the buddy-boat fleet would be catching up, dropped anchor.
Due to mud-flat, the water wasn’t great, but the bird watching was excellent, with terns putting on quite the show.
The French boat left a couple hours later, leaving us alone. I watched pangas come and go from a small fishing camp around the corner from us, but none ever ventured into the anchorage. Still, we maintained a watch at sunset, periodically pausing what we were doing to go out and scan the horizon for pangas.
Later in the afternoon, we received a WhatsApp message from the 2 boats remaining in the fleet, anchored maybe a half mile west of us, on the other side of the island.
Two pleasant days passed while I did some remote work. We slept comfortably each night with the northerly breeze flowing through Miette’s cabin.
The fleet, low on provisions, was bound for Isla Contadora next. I’d seen that SV Alexis, who we’d met in El Salvador and again in Nicaragua, was anchored there, and figured it would be great to catch up with the skipper and compare notes on our travels.
There are roads, electricity, and a couple stores there, so we took advantage of the wind to make two long tacks to the new anchorage. As the crow flies, Contadora was only 7 miles to the north, but after sailing close-hauled to the northeast, and then to the northwest, our ground track was almost 15 miles by the time we arrived.
There’s a massive resort on the east side of Contadora that now stands abandoned, slowly succumbing to the jungle. In its heyday, it was a playground of the rich and famous, facing a white sand beach of the most incredibly light blue water we’ve ever seen. It’s closure is rumored to be due to a mix of financial mismanagement and debt, possible money-laundering ties to Colombian cartels, and the death of the owner in a mysterious airplane crash.
I love exploring ruins and abandoned buildings, though these were so dilapidated, I didn’t set foot inside most of the structures.
A ferry, which also belonged to the resort, now lies beached and covered in graffiti. A younger me would have clambered aboard to poke around, but instead, I used a 360 camera on a 9 ft. stick to take a look inside.
There isn’t much to do on the island. There are a few hotels and restaurants, a handful of walled-off luxury residences, but much of the island is vacant lots of crumbling ruins.
For now, we’re enjoying staying anchored in one spot for a week or so, but we’ll need to head back to Panama City for major provisioning, and while there, likely begin planning our canal transit.
If you’ve got 20 minutes, please enjoy our video capturing our journey around these islands and let us know what you think.