Sailing Panama & San Blas Isles: exploring a remote archipelago on a tall ship from Windjammer Barefoot Cruises

Cruise Travel, July-August, 2004 by Glen Petrie

"You're a Newbie!"

"A Virgin!"

The pair of passengers grilling me at the welcome aboard get-together had already been dipping into the free 151-proof rum. Yes, this was my first sailing with Windjammer Barefoot Cruises. No, I did not know the difference between a jib and jigger, a mizzen and a swizzle. I did, however, have the uncomfortable feeling that I might be keel-hauled or suffer some other frat-housestyle initiation rite. But no. I was merely thrust a drink and thumped on the back. "You're gonna love it!"

I was one of the few Newbies, too; most of my fellow 67 passengers on the SV (sailing vessel) Mandalay were veterans of at least two previous Jammer trips--some as many as 10. They were all converts, dedicated to the kind of kicked-back vacation you get on a ship where it really is possible to go seven days without shoes. But I have to admit that what drew me to this trip was not the thrill of sailing (though that too is appealing) as much as the itinerary, a brand new one for Windjammer: the San Blas Islands of Panama. I had visited the area briefly before on a small Cruise West ship (Cruise Travel, October, 2002) and ever since have dreamed of coming back. But the remoteness of the archipelago, largely uninhabited but for healthy populations of tropical fish, means you need a boat. Big cruise ships occasionally stop at the main island of El Porvenir, with its airport and town, but no cruise was available to take me throughout the isles. Until now.

San Blas--or Kuna Yala, to use the proper name (San Bias being the old colonial moniker bestowed by Spanish conquistadors)--is home to the indigenous Kuna Indians who inhabit only 36 of the nearly 400 coral-reef islands in the chain. (Locals like to claim 365 islands, one for every day of the year but the true number is higher.) The islands and the people are unique. Through sheer stubbornness. they have resisted forced assimilation with mainland Panamanians winning governmental autonomy in a 1938 treaty. This gave the Kuna the power to protect their own culture, and they cling to it faithfully even now.

No foreign investment is permitted. Tourism is strictly controlled and generally kept at bay. This is why Kuna Yala remains the last unspoiled corner of the Caribbean. No big hotels, no crowds, no T-shirt stands, no pollution, and with the possible exception of Belize, the best snorkeling in the Caribbean (no scuba diving, however, as Kuna traditional law forbids it).

The Mandalay, being self-sustaining and carrying a maximum of only 72 passengers, has special permission to cruise these waters. Strict rules are followed to ensure that the islands are as pristine when the ship leaves as when she arrives. Windjammer has even added one very special crew-member, Gilberto Alemancia, a university-educated Kuna, who helps passengers understand the history and customs of Kuna Yala, adding a valuable dimension to the cruise.

Our weeklong voyage through this precious part of the world began in the hamlet of Portobello, a 90-minute transfer on good roads from Panama City to the Caribbean coast. A picturesque port of old Spanish Colonial architecture nestled at the base of jungle-clad mountains, it holds the little-known distinction of being the final resting place of Sir Francis Drake. A legendary English admiral who had successfully plundered the gold-laden Spanish forts on this coast, Drake died of dysentery and was given a sea burial in a lead casket just offshore. Perhaps, I imagined, just below the keel of the Mandalay.

Our voyage involved neither plunder nor dysentery, and our ship was no boxy galleon. The Mandalay is an exquisitely sleek yacht, close enough to a barquentine, but is in fact (for you purists) a three-masted topsail-rigged schooner (a true barquentine has four square sails on the foremast, while the Mandalay has only two). Built by E.F. Hutton in 1923 as the Hussar, the 236-foot steel vessel was immediately pronounced too small by Hutton's wife, Marjorie Meriweather Post, who demanded he build a bigger one (he did, the Sea Cloud, also still sailing).

The ship then embarked on a colorful career, including 27 years as Columbia University's intrepid oceanographic vessel Vema, racking up 1.25 million miles while charting previously unknown areas of the earth's oceans. Eventually Capt. Mike Burke, founder/owner of Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, found her laid up in Halifax in 1980, where he purchased her for a modest sum but spent $2 million rebuilding her as a sail cruiser. He added a deck on top (which actually helped the ship's lines), outfitted her interiors with lavish use of mahogany and teak, and renamed her Mandalay (just because he liked the sound of it in Rudyard Kipling's poem Road To Mandalay).

It was Burke's own idea to position his ship in San Bias, and what a brilliant idea it was. From Portobello we raised sail (and fired engine) and ambled east through an enchanting chain of isles and cays, liberally thrown like pearls across blue-green seas. One was never more than a few miles from the other, and each looked like a setting for Gilligan's Island: tiny, ringed with coral reefs, and sporting a bushy crop of coconut palms. The palm trees are all owned by Kuna families, and trading coconuts with small boats from Colombia provides the Kuna their main source of staple supplies.