Lovely San Blas

April 2, 2008: Sea Quill arrived in the archipelago of sandy, coconut tree islands known as the San Blas. Like many sailors, we made landfall at Chichime, fifty nautical miles from Isla Grande, Panama.

After eyeballing our way through the narrow break in the reef -- a ritual we would repeat many times in the San Blas, we set anchor in thirty feet of warm, crystal clear water. It took Jen two seconds to jump in.

The San Blas are a dream destination for sailors. The archipelago is made up of about 350 pristine islands with fine sand beaches and excellent snorkeling on healthy reefs. Most of the islands are tiny -- some have only a single palm tree. Gunk-holing from one island to another is a breeze, with pleasant sailing on reef-protected water, and endless choices of beautiful anchorages just an hour or two in any direction.

On the offshore islands, the water is often crystal clear. These bright starfish were under two feet of water...

The beautiful "slime-skin" pattern of a recently broken coral, before the skin dried off.

The indigenous, Kuna Indians, who govern the San Blas, are warm and friendly people. Their name for their land is Kuna Yala. On Panamanian maps, it is also called the Comarca de Kuna Yala. The opportunity to meet the Kuna and glimpse their unique culture is another great reason to cruise here.

Most islands are uninhabited, but settled ones, like Isla Tigre, below, have tidy villages of palm-thatched huts, separated by sand paths. At a certain hour one afternoon, we watched dozens of Kuna women come out of their huts carrying brooms. They proceeded to sweep and clean the sand walkways of the village. Then they disappeared back into their huts with their brooms.

The Kuna are excellent sailors, sailing every day to fish, to tend coconut trees (their main cash crop), to farm inland plots for food, or collect water from the rivers. The traditional sailing rig is a dugout canoe -- an "ulu" in the Kuna language -- with a short, collapsible mast, a gaff-rigged main, and the occasional foresail. An oversized, carved wood paddle serves as the rudder or the oar, as needed.

The Kuna are keenly artistic, particularly with textiles. While resourceful economy is probably the main reason for their typical patchwork sails, the patterns are beautifully composed. We loved the hand-painted patchwork sail below. Why don't more of us sailors sport colorful, patterned sails?

One day, near Kanildup, we lost the propeller to our outboard engine in thirty-five feet of murky water (it's a long story). When we had just about given up hope of finding it, two young men sailed by on a brisk beam reach. Glancing into their ulu, we saw masks and fins. Skin-divers! Diving and searching along the bottom, they found our prop in a matter of minutes. We offered them some money, but they really wanted spare fabric to patch a sail. Ulf fished out a blue tarp from the bottom of a locker and gave it to them. A few weeks later, Angel and Giovanni passed us again. This time, our old blue tarp was patched into their sail. "Sea Quill" was was spelled in large, white letters along the edge. Only then we remembered that, back in Guatemala, Jen practiced painting "Sea Quill" on it, before painting it for good on our spray guards.

"Sea Quill," the ulu

No matter where you anchor in the San Blas, Kuna women visit with "molas" to sell. Molas are the distinctive textile of the Kuna, and an integral part of the women's traditional costume. This is Claudia, with her husband Pablo, and son Alber. Claudia, an expert mola-maker from the island of Mormake Tupu, is wearing the traditional Kuna outfit. Two molas with coordinating designs make up the front and back panels of her blouse.

Every mola is a unique, hand-stitched design, made in the reverse applique technique. The layers are individually cut in the desired pattern, and the top layers are rolled under and hand-sewn with miniscule stitches. Each color in the mola comes from a different layer of cloth. Many beautiful molas are designed and sewn specifically for the tourist trade, but it is also possible to buy used molas, which the artist made for her own costume, and is ready to sell. As a long-time vintage shopper and thrifter, Jen preferred the used molas.

Child's blouse with abstract, three-color molas and solid, pink fringe at waist; detail

Kuna society is matriarchal and property is passed down through women. Some families with the misfortune to have sons, but no daughters, will rear one son as a girl, so that the family property can be passed down properly to a "daughter." A Kuna boy reared as a girl, will dress like a female, spend most of his time among women, and practice the traditional female crafts, which include mola-making. There is no stigma to transvestitism or homosexuality in Kuna Yala. And some of the most talented mola makers are homosexual or transvestite men. Some things in art and design are the same, no matter where you go.

A many-layered mola by Venancio Restrepo; detail of a used two-layer mola with a star-patterned base fabric.

Details of two multi-layer molas by Lisa.

One of the biggest communities in the San Blas is the combined village of Nargana and Corazon de Jesus, two small islands connected by a foot bridge. They are two of three islands in the San Blas that voted to abandon their traditional lifestyle and adopt a modern Panamanian one. Trading boats from Colombia are a common sight at the docks. Televisions play from inside the huts. Many homes are made of concrete. Some women have even given up their traditional costumes and molas for western clothes. There is a well-organized school, with uniformed students, intramural basketball, and an internet lab.

The evangelical influence on these two modernized islands is readily apparent -- and unfortunate, we think.

The airstrip to the east of Corazon de Jesus, receives two flights from Panama City each morning. The planes buzz right over the roofs and the masts of sailboats anchored nearby. to land abruptly on what our friend Sandie, a recent passenger, described as "a runway the size of a band-aid." That isn't such hyperbole. These pilots are good at what they do.

Being more modernized, Nargana and Corazon de Jesus have a few tourism-oriented businesses, which are rarities in the San Blas overall. Nali's Cafe is one of them. It's a pleasant place, with friendly service. As we were in Nargana several times to meet friends at the air strip, Nali's became a bit of a hangout.

Two photos: courtesy of Jen Ziegler

There's something else we should mention about the villages of the San Blas: the toilets.

There isn't any plumbing. If you need to use the bathroom, you walk the plank.... Inside the hut is a hole that goes straight into the sea. Since the "chute" is visible to all, isn't the hut itself kind of quaint? Sort of like when kids cover their own eyes, and say, "now you can't see me."

A mile up Rio Diablo, where everything is clean and pristine, we collected water and did our laundry. The Kuna, and we, drank the water straight from the inland rivers. And we were fine. Downstream from the water collectors, but upstream from where the river goes brackish, we did our clothes washing.

In Central America and the Caribbean, laundry soap is sold in bars, as well as powdered. But bar soap is common, since many people still do laundry by hand. One day in Panama City, Jen was looking wistfully at a clothes scrubbing board in the window of a hardware shop: a technological advance for the crew of Sea Quill.

Frederico is a friendly man from Nargana, who makes his living providing various services to yachties, from water and diesel delivery, to laundry service (hand washed in Rio Diablo, of course), or even provisioning through his brother Juliano's grocery store. If you sail to Nargana, you'll soon meet Frederico and Juliano. It will be a pleasure.

In the San Blas, one often has an island to oneself. It's wonderfully primitive: no running water, no electricity, no internet, no stores (except for some enterprising, popular guys who visit the yachts by lancha, selling fresh fruit, veggies, and even boxed wine). A couple times, Kuna families paddled up to Sea Quill, and handed us ziplock bags with cell phones and carefully coiled chargers: "Could you charge up our phones, please?"

When we couldn't get to a river, we collected rain water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Since there are no such things as garbage facilities, we burned our burnable garbage, and stored the rest. A depressing sign of civilization (besides missionaries) in Kuna Yala, and indeed throughout the Caribbean, is the enormous amount of plastic and glass rubbish, and medical waste, washed up on the windward side of nearly every island. Mountains of non-degradable plastics -- from soda bottles to spatulas to flip flops -- are a blaring alert that we all must consume more responsibly and consciously. All that plastic crap doesn't just... disappear.

On the contrary, it's the islands themselves that disappear. Many of the tiny islands of the San Blas are fringed by fallen, uprooted palm trees, the casualties of rising ocean level because of global warming. Each year, the ocean swallows up a little bit more land. A handful of low San Blas islands that existed just a few decades ago, have already disappeared.

The environmental crisis is not lost on the Kuna, for whom this archipelago is everything. In fact, one type of community service for law-breakers in Kuna Yala is the collection of barrels of coral rubble and stones to buttress the beaches and prevent further erosion and land-loss to the rising sea.

Could it be a matter of just a few years before this lovely archipelago, and it's unique culture, are gone?