Up at 7 am and breakfast on left over pastries from yesterday and apples we brought with us. Our room faces east so, we get a sunrise every morning.
Breakfasts at the resort left a lot to be desired, expensive (for Mexico) cold when they should have been hot, poor ingredients when eating at a 4 star resort, etc.
Lunches were as bad, the restaurants open at noon for lunch, but that doesn’t mean they are serving lunch anytime soon. Our experience was we sat down at noon and ordered as soon as possible, one of the people in our group ordered a very light lunch, (Nacho’s) they were the last one served at 12:55. This is only an issue if you have a schedule like a seminar that you are leading at 1pm. Which was the case for the leader, his lunch was served at 12:50. The problem here is that there really is not an option as the nearest restaurant to the resort that is outside is probably a 20 minute walk out the front of the place.
The rooms, views and pools were very nice. The first session was held outside as there was an issue with the room we were scheduled to be meeting in. It was ready by the afternoon session, and we met there for the rest of the sessions.
The Panama Posse has only been going for about 5 years. This year they have had 266 boats sign up. They have arranged discounts at 60 marinas between San Diego and Florida, Home Depot, and many other places. They also have a very well designed web page, with lots of information about the route, weather, and anchorages. They have quite a bit of information on “must see” locations. They also have a weekly phone call via an app called LINE that is handled sort of like a net without the checkins. During the week between the calls, the app can be used to text a question to the group, anyone can respond and everyone gets to see it. You can also use it to contact someone directly in a private text.
Saturday morning was a swap meet, and the session in the afternoon was a tech support session to get OPENCPN working and charts, this is important as there are many issues with the available marine software packages and the more charts of an area you get teh more likely you are to see the problems. There were at least two examples shown that Navionics and another commercial map package showed as being clear with no obstructions, but Google Earth satellite pictures clearly showed that there was a reef there. OpenCPN allows adding tiles from a variety of sources to better address these issues. There was one example shown where someone had tried to go around a reef by using the chart and ran aground and lost the boat. (He was a single handed vessel and had been up too long etc. as well). We needed hard disk space of 250 GB, and did not have it. A couple of us ran into town (the advantage of having a car) and bought a couple of hard drives.
Sunday morning Reneé and I went to church in Melaque about a 4 miles north of the resort and about a half hour drive to go around the lagoon. The last time we were there, the building was a palapa (poles for supports and palm fronds for a roof, no walls, and clean and neat, pretty impressive. This time, we found that the “building” had apparently suffered in a hurricane (maybe?) and was in the process of being rebuilt, so we had the same floor but the roof was basically tarps stretched overhead. After church and lunch we went back for a session on provisioning and a recap with a Q&A session.
There were a couple of get togethers with drinks and food, one was a photo session and the other was a potluck. Both fairly typical cruiser type affairs.
