Holandes

We are still in the San Blas, but we have left Coco Banderos. At first we
went to one of the San Blas's biggest towns, Nargana. Even though this is
one of the biggest towns there is still no running water. The houses were an
assortment of tin roofs, and thatched roofs made from palm fronds. Many of
the house's walls are made from cane. There was one store we bought from
that even had a baby fawn wandering around the store. The fawn was the
perfect likeness of Bambi. We only stayed in Nargana about one day, until we
left for the Holandes. The Holandes took only two hours by boat to get to.
The Holandes is more sheltered from wind than Coco Banderos where we had a
few storms. During one storm six of the eight boats' anchors let go, and
they had to struggle to re-anchor or get their engine started before they
blowed onto a reef. Lucky for us we were one of the boats that stayed still
We have been in the Holandes for about a day, and have already gone
snorkeling. The reef we went snorkeling on had a variety of fish in all
shapes and sizes. The fish ranged from small triangular yellow fish to a
nurse shark. I myself didn't see the nurse shark here, but I did see one in
the Coco Banderos. Another neat fish was the jewel fish, which was a small
black fish with purple spots that appeared to glow like jewels. The coral
wasn't colorful, but was often large and reached out across the reef.
Unfortunately we don't have a underwater camera case so we won't have any
photos of the reef from below the sea. We may be able to get one when we
leave the San Blas. Where we are now is peaceful if you consider the number
of Kunas we have had trying to sell us molas. Molas are embroidary with
multiple layers, that are created by the Kuna Indians. Most other places we
would have women come out in conoes at least two times a day attempting to
sell us there work. Here we have only had men trying to sell us crab and
lobster. We will continue to explore the San Blas once we leave the
Holandes.

San Blas Islands

We have entered the San Blas, and have visited two of the islands so far.
The San Blas Islands are a group of islands with Kuna Indians living on
them. The Kuna government strives very hard to preserve the original
culture. The result? Thatched roof huts, dugout canoes, traditional
clothing, and many other interesting customs. The people here are very
anxious to sell us things, and everyday we have someone come out in their
canoes offering to sell us things. The women come out to our boat selling
heaps of colorful molas, bracelets, masks, and some of their other
creations. It is tough to say "No, we already bought some molas," and every
time they come to the boat we purchase more molas. They want $1 or $2 per
photo we take of them. The men come out selling crab, lobster, and bread.
Kuna bread is very good, and I have consumed far more than I should have
rationed myself to. I'm eating Kuna Bread as we speak. The San Blas look
like the scenes on travel brochures, except without any civilization. The
water is crystal clear, and is great for swimming. The sea floor is littered
with starfish. I accidentally stepped on them a few times.

About to Go

We are about to leave, we are saying goodbye to everyone.

We are leaving Colon today, because we have had our engine repaired. We are going to island hop to the San Blas.

Tadpoles!

Our tadpoles we adopted are becoming frogs! We have had them for around a week, and one of them has become a miniature frog (or toad, we don't know which) while the rest are still tadpoles. We have seen what they will grow up to be, and their final form is huge!

Photos

I recently updated this blog with a million photos. I regretted that decision, because it made this blog very unorganized. Now I have removed all the photos and put them here.

Here is a list of programs I think are neat:
Google Earth-useful
Picasa+Hello-useful
Google Web Accelerator-useful
StarLogo 2-fun

How I organize my photos.

Picasa is what I am using to manage my photos. Picasa is free, and even icludes some basic editing tools. I use another program "Hello" to upload my photos to my Blog. Picasa and Hello work very well together. Both are free.

I made this my backround on my computer for a while. It is of one of our friends boats leaving Providencia. This Photo was taken a few weeks ago.

Panther Warning!

Yesterday me, Heather, and two other kids were going to walk to a beach. The road to the beach led through a dense forest. Well when we got to the start of the we decided we wanted to go to a different beach. Everyone thought we were going to the forest beach. After we left my mom discovered that there had been a panther spotting near the beach we were originally going to go to. We had about three or four people looking for us thinking we were in danger. That was pretty interesting.

We paln on heading to the San Blas soon. When we get there I will probably be able to update this blog about once a week.

New Photos!!!

Sorry I randomly bombarded you with unorganized photos. By unorganized I mean that they aren't in the right order and they are all seperate posts.

These photos are of our entire trip so far. These photos are a mostly my own, but my dad and a few other people also provided me with some of these photos.

If you like any of these pictures post a message, and I will load more photos from the same place.

*UPDATE* I removed all photos from my blog and transfered them to here.

Huge Fish!

A friend of ours just caught about 4-5 4ft. fish. He also caught 2 red snapper. Every once in a while he will go out in the sport fishing boat and go fishing for the day.

Also the bannanas in the US taste much worse then they do here. I ate 5 bannanas today, and they tasted so good.

Currently we are having a debate over fans. My mom thinks we should get new larger fans, beacauce our computer fans don't do much. On the other side my dad is saying it will burn to much power, even though we arn't certain. I think we should get the fans, because it is really hot here at night and it makes it hard to sleep.

Riiiiiing!!

Every morning I have a alarm set so I can wake up early and have more free time. This morning when the alarm went off everyone got annoyed with me for waking them up.
Yesterday at a small party we met the creator of The Panama Cruising Guide. The Panama Cruising Guide is a great guide with great photography and aerial photographs.

Good morning.

Yesterday, I had a feeling that I had to play soccer(football for some of you). I realized that when I get back from our trip that I will be horrible at soccer. I have only played two matches in the 10 months we have been on the boat.

Also yesterday I downloaded two neat programs produced by M.I.T. that are really interesting. Well to me at least. I downloaded Starlogo 2, and Starlogo TNG. Starlogo 2 is 2D and is my favorite of the two. Starlogo TNG is 3d and I don't like it as much. These programs allow you to command turtles using simple programming codes. For example

to setup
ca
crt 10
ask-turtles [setc blue fd 10]
ask-turtles [seth random 360 fd random 10]
end


That code is pretty complex for me. It means "If you want to "Setup" clear the map of all tiles and turtles, create 10 turtles, ask the turtles to change their color to blue, move forward 10 spaces, ask the turtles to turn randomly between zero and 360 degrees, ask the turtle to move randomly between 0 and 10 degrees, that is how to setup"

Now you are probably wondering what turtles are, turtles are the "creatures" that can move around the map. Tiles are the tiles on the ground which can't move. That picture is the end result of what that line of code did. If you do download this program I highly advise you go through the tutorial.

I also got two useful programs called Microsoft Visual basic, and Microsoft Visual Web Developer. Those are both free, but I wouldn't advise downloading them, because the files are huge. Luckily the person who suggested them to me had it on a CD.

Every program I mentioned is free.

I lost my post :(

I just wrote a lengthy entry to this blog, when I got a message "Firefox has encounterd a error and needs to close" I'll post what I was going to post tomorrow.

I have to start School Work soon.

Sigh.... I have to start school work soon. The only upside to doing schoolwork is we get to go to a nice air conditioned room. My parents use a voice that I call the fog horn voice to say "SchoooooollWooooooorkkk". I find this voice very obnoxious.

Yaaaawwn....

Its 9:00 down here, and I actually thought It was 7:00 when I got up. I'm really sleepy... yaaaawnnn..... really sleepy. There isn't much left to say.

We just killed a cockroach!

I was just about to update this blog, and I had no clue what I was going to put here, when I heard "I killed a roach!". So in conclusion my dad just killed a cockroach. Actually this news has a bit of meaning, because cockroachs are the worst bug to have on the boat, and this tells us that in this area we are prone to them. You can see why we hate them by looking at the picture. These things arn't small either, they are about 1-2 inches in length. In other news it is burining hot here in Colon.

Picture of Me.

I wanted to update this page with a good photo of me, I hope I can find one.
Hmmmmmm......... There arn't many good photos of me.

Here it is:

O well, so there arn't any good images of me on this computer, actually, there arn't good images of me on any computer.

I have been using the computer most of the day. I was being given very good advice on filming and organizing the film on my computer, among other things such as good programs to get.

My sister Heather was just given a bracelet from a Kuna Indian, that he made for Heather. The bracelet reads "HEAThER". That "h" isn't a typo.
The bracelet has a Panama flag on one end, and a American flag on the other end. This was a really nice beaded bracelet, and probably took him a few hours to make. This bracelet was given to her free too.

My First Post Here

This is my first post in my blog. Someone advised me to start a blog, because they get many more hits. This may be more of just an advertisement for my website, and the posts here and there will be very similar if not the same.
Who are we? We are a family traveling on our sailboat "Minke". We have traveled down the east coast of the US, from Florida around Cuba and to a tiny island called Swan Island. After that we went to Providencia(Below), then Bocas Del Toro, then to where we are now, Colon, Panama.
Our marina is within walking distance of a huge forest, and each night we can hear howler monkeys "howling". The first time I heard them howling, they gave me the chills, they sounded like a pack of angry dogs. The forest also houses bats, ants, panthers, many many birds, and other animals I can't remember. Oh, speaking of birds, did you know Panama has more species of birds than all of North America?
Colon is the city at the enrtrance to the Panama canal, and is known for its crime. Lucky for us we are in a marina seperated from the city by the forest. Also we are near a naval, and coast guard base that guards the area. Our marina is called the Shelter Bay Marina.
That wraps up my first entry, check for more updates frequently. Download Google Maps if you liked those satellite images. Its free!