Banana Boat
Well, more like the canal. It is fascinating to be moored here only a football field’s length or so outside the ship channel leading to the canal. Gigantic ships glide back and forth along it at all hours of the day and night. 
Japanese Navy Ship
See how this cargo ship dwarfs Neko (right side of photo, closest boat to cargo ship)
We were pleasantly surprised that they actually throw up very little wake to roll us around. The work boats on the other hand, are a completely different story.
Go Speed Racer Go
Boats come and go allowing us to be neighbors with few interesting boats.
Open 50 raceboat used as a cruiser
Falcor-a Gunboat owned by pro snowboarder Travis Rice
The boats swing according to the current except around slack tide, when the wind dominates. Since we have a lot of windage and are very light with no deep keel, we turn before the boats around us. This has brought us into contact with PapaChino, the local fishing boat moored right next to us, on several occasions.
So we have had to shorten the mooring lines and keep a sharp eye on that thing to keep it off the back of our boat.
BYC dock
The “yacht club’s” dock is a rusting, jagged metal thing that canal work boats and ferries use to pick up passengers and supplies. We don’t want to tie up to it but we will have to in order to fuel up for our transit and install the repaired dagger board. The water is horribly dirty, so we are not using our watermaker but ferrying jugs of water back from the dock each time we go in. The incessant rain and humidity is causing mold to sprout on everything, bleach is Mary’s best friend.
Daily lighting storms
We aren’t in California anymore. Cough, cough, cough
It all makes you think it is miserable here, doesn’t it? Well, we are actually having a pretty good time. Panama City is a large, diverse and interesting metropolis. We like cities like this which do not depend solely on tourism as they give a better feel for what life is really like. We have done some great sightseeing around Panama and always like getting to a big city after weeks out in the wilderness. So, although we are about ready to move on, our time in Panama City was quite enjoyable. For more info about it, click here see Mary’s post.
Sailing on Neko 
Always interesting. Look forward to my Neko friends’ posts.
It was cool to watch your transit so far! Love the pictures too.
Can you guys catch rain water? Since we’ve arrived in C.R. (or maybe it’s since the rains started here in C.R.) we catch rain on the decks which are dammed up using ziplock bags full of water and voila, water that’s cleaner / fresher than our water maker can make (about 8 ppm tds) fill the tanks. Yesterday when a cell came through Golfito, we filled the tanks, (probably about 40 gallons) in 15-20 minutes! Cool that you are through! Holly and I had our first Aeropress. Mmmm …
Hey Mike, we caught rain water in buckets in Golfito. Here in Panama the rain has not really not been beavy enough to bother. The dock water was clean with a little chlorine in it, which we put straight into the tanks. Since the watermaker is pickled, no worries about membrane issues and its probably good to get a little oogy-killing bleach in there. In Balboa we did, however, have a great chap named Foo Foo build some new awnings to go over our salon and foredeck. In addition to keeping the boat MUCH cooler, we will put through hulls and hoses on these and funnel rainwater into our tanks. But since we have dock water here in SBM, I’ve been a bit lazy.
Pete