One thing I have not mentioned very much is one of the traditions we have in the Panama Canal. And that is serving Panama Rolls during the morning. We have them around the ship for the guests, we have them on the bridge and most important we have them on the mooring stations. For us that is important as it keeps the Panama Canal crew happy. When going through the locks we get 19 Panama Canal crew on board, 12 forward and 7 aft for handling the wires of the locomotives. We have more of them on the bow due to the fact that with the flare of the bow, the area that needs to be covered is larger and thus more men needed to handle the wires at the same time. On the stern, the aft mooring station is more compact as it is the blunt bit of the ship and thus 7crew suffice. Each group has a bo’sun who is in contact with the pilot on the bridge, on the same VHF channel as the locomotives. As soon as the locomotives have been connected they are on standby, waiting for them to be disconnected again. To keep them quiet and happy in the interim, we fill them up with Panama Rolls (http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Panama_Cinnamon_Rolls) and Orange juice. They get through a lot of that stuff as they tend to stack up for home as well. I have attached the recipe, although on the ship we do not always include cinnamon. 

Golfo Dulce is not that far away from Panama, you just have to get around the West side of Panama to get there. So most of the night we sailed under the Panamanian coast on a westerly course with about 14 knots of speed to enter Golfo Dulce as planned by 2 pm. This is also as far South as we go on this cruise roughly 420 miles north of the Equator. You still see a lot of Panama Canal traffic but by early morning that is all gone as we follow the coastlines towards Gulfo Dulce while all the other ships keep to their deep sea tracks towards North America. We are at the end of the rainy season so the numbers of showers are diminishing. During our first call here, we hardly saw anything due to the dense rain coming down but this time there were only showers in the distance and none above us. Golfo Dulce can be a challenge for our visit as it depends on what there is to see. Sometimes wildlife is in full swing, with birds, dolphins and even whales and sometimes it is very quiet. So it was today.

Apart from hundreds of coconuts floating by, not much was happening. Normally we do not see that many coconuts, but today and tomorrow we have the highest tides of the year here in the area and that means that the water can reach, and lift off, debris from the beach that is normally not touched. And that debris includes coconuts, which float very well and could now be seen bobbing out to sea. Eventually they will strand somewhere and maybe a new palm tree will come out of it. We have extra high water, and thus extra low water at the moment as sun and moon are working in conjunction to exercise maximum force on the tidal movement of the ship.

That does not matter very much today, but tomorrow in Puerto Caldera it will be a challenge for our gangway to create an operational entrance and exit to the ship. We will have our backup gangway standby, and if our regular gangway door disappears under the dock, we can hook up the higher one. We will see what the tide is exactly doing when we get there, as the calculations that we make and information that we have do not always take local circumstances in consideration.

So we did our scenic cruise in Golfo Dulce according to plan. This time the agent and boarding officer had brought the port management with him, instead of the family but the clearance still went as scheduled while we did our 2.5 hour scenic cruise. By 16.30 they were gone again and we were on our way to Puerto Caldera with an expected time of arrival of 05.00 at the pilot station. I will be in bed early tonight. The weather looks extremely good for tomorrow, almost too good. The forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and no wind. That means a very warm day ashore.