Flying Back to Panama and the Ocean Posse Party

On Saturday, January 25, we all woke up before 0600 PST, despite going to bed so late. Even though we were in San Diego for a week, our body clocks never fully adjusted to the time change, and we felt off-kilter all week. We mostly focused on taking care of “life chores,” the most exciting of which was getting Keith’s braces removed.

On Friday, January 31, we flew back to Panama via a red-eye through Miami. We had been warned that Panama will not allow people with a one-way plane ticket to fly into the country. Like many countries, they welcome tourists, but they want proof that the visitors don’t intend to overstay their welcome. We were told that we’d likely be forced to purchase a ticket back to the US prior to boarding the plane.

Prior to leaving Panama, we’d gotten a letter from the marina stating that Kosmos was docked there. Eric attached it to our US Coast Guard vessel documentation showing that Eric and Christi owned Kosmos, along with a crew list with Keith on it.

We showed up to the airport almost three-hours before our flight time so that we’d have plenty of time to sort out the plane ticket issue. The ticket agent looked at it for a long time, then called a manager over. The manager looked at it for a long time, then approved us to fly on a one-way ticket. The ticket agent typed in quite a lot of information from the documentation into their system to justify allowing the one-way ticket.

The flights back were uneventful. Keith got a fair amount of sleep. Eric got a little sleep. Christi got almost none. Eric had arranged for the same driver that had taken us to the airport to pick us up again. Eric was worried about finding a taxi willing to take us so far. It turned out that the taxis charge a premium for being hailed from the airport, so we actually saved quite a bit of money by having pre-arranged the ride.

We made it back to the marina at about 1600 EST. We were horrified to see that Kosmos was filthy, covered in black soot, which was likely from the container ship traffic and the boat yard. We knew it had been consistently raining, so we had expected the rain to keep the boat from getting too gross. But we should know by now that when the air is dirty, all rain does is make the boat even dirtier.

We were exhausted, but we knew we needed to stay up until at least 2000 in order to get our body clocks calibrated to local time. It was actually easy to stay up because the Ocean Posse was having a big cruiser party that was getting started. They’d actually had a full day of training classes before the party started, but we’d missed the classes.

As part of the festivities, they brought in a children’s dance troupe to perform traditional Panamanian dances. They did several dances. Christi was pulled in to dance with them multiple times. Here is a photo and a few clips: