Saturday 24 December – Christmas Eve in the jungle

What a blissful place to wake up, the water is flat, the bird noise is extraordinarily musical and we love this place. So no rush to depart, and we quickly decided to stay another night.

Cruising down the river (in time lapse!)

We spent the morning cleaning out the guest hull and drying out the bilges, with 12 very soggy toilet rolls trying to dry out in the sun. We also decided it was an ideal calm spot to sort out Sporty (the Gennaker sail), she was all unravelled in the forward locker. We managed to haul her onto the boat and rather scarily got her hoisted with only a few glitches along the way, and a few flying ropes as a breeze came through. Rowan thought I was going to take off at one point, but we finally got her on and re-furled, quite an effort, I was very glad to be doing it on the calm river rather than out at sea.

12 soggy loo rolls from the bilge…. desperately trying to save my eco friendly loo rolls, but sadly looking un-recoverable!

In the afternoon we decided to go all the way down the river. As we were leaving, a monohull and small Cat entered the river mouth, they anchored closer to the fort, we felt like we had intruders!

Pootling down the river

Surprised to find we are not alone

We pootled up the meandering river and we were surprised to find a French Monohull anchored a mile up. We continued up and could start hearing the noises of the boats in the canal and then we saw the dam wall with cars crossing over. Fishermen with their cars were down at the river at the bottom of the wall. The human noises were distracting, so we headed back down the river a mile or so to a nice wide spot where I had noticed a little bit of 4G signal. It was a lovely spot and we managed to catch up on a lot of WhatsApp messages. With a lot of effort I managed to post one blog, but it was way too frustrating with the signal dropping in and out.

It was another magical night and we enjoyed watching another episode of White Lotus on Rowan’s big IPad. By the time we went to bed we decided to spend Christmas Day here, with a little signal we could contact the kids but if we head off to do our 24 hour sail to Bocas Del Toro we might not have any signal. I was very happy wafting off to sleep knowing we were going to have a chilled Christmas in the jungle.