Sailing Guna Yala (The San Blas Archipelago) in the Ulus Sailing Canoe
by David Nghiem "It all started when I discovered I could no longer visit Bermuda and stay on a boat belonging to a close friend of mine..."
It all started when I discovered I could no longer visit Bermuda and stay on a boat belonging to a close friend of mine. I’d spent the last six years, with multiple trips, helping my friend refurbish and maintain his small flotilla of sail and motor boats. So it stung when I realized I could no longer travel to Bermuda to do my “work-cations.”
But it was also time for a change. For starters, I’d spent the last six years helping several friends repair and maintain their boats on land, and sometimes moored in a slip. Yet I put in zero hours sailing them, and I badly wanted a sailing adventure.
I also needed a summer vacation. I manage an understaffed and busy bike shop in a university town, and run two small businesses. I hadn’t taken a break since the previous year so I was stretched thin and burned out…and me being me, I needed an adventure break.
That’s when I remembered an article that intrigued me from Small Craft Advisor, “Bahamian Beach Cruising: Chartering a Sea Pearl 21 in the Exumas” by Rachel Doss, in the SCA #123. That article caught my attention because I didn’t know it was possible to charter such a small sailboat, and I also had no idea that you could find that sort of thing in the Caribbean area, let alone Latin America.
So I started exploring my options. First I considered traveling to Belize and renting a kayak to explore the world’s second largest barrier reef, or do the same thing Rachel did, which was to go to the Bahamas and charter a Sea Pearl 21. My adventure had a few minimum requirements: it had to be in Latin American, involve saltwater, water craft, free-diving, fishing, and camping for several days.
While mulling over the idea, I pulled out my old and well-worn ITMB travel map of Central America. The map was full of my notes and arrows to points I stopped at while riding my bicycle across South and Central America for two years.
There was a faint hand-written note on the map on Panama City. It said, “landed here from Bolivia. Immediately took a bus to San Jose, Costa Rica.” I remembered why, too. When I arrived, I had less than four days to get to Punta Arenas, a peninsula on the West Coast of Costa Rica. I made a promise to meet two college friends there the year before, and there was no way I could bike that distance from Panama City, fully loaded with panniers and gear in that amount of time. I spent less than a day in Panama, and it was the only Central American state without multiple notes written from my journey.
I had an old friend from that bicycle adventure who lived in Panama City, and I hadn’t seen him in 15 years. Last I checked, his employer moved him there from Bolivia to be a regional manager for Latin America. I checked my Facebook Messenger archive. Last time I talked to him was in 2014. So I sent him a message and crossed my fingers. Many of my friends abandoned social media during these turbulent times, so I hoped he’d see it and get back to me.
While I waited for a reply, I grabbed a copy of Frommer’s Guidebook to Panama. One of the things I remembered about Panama was meeting other travelers who raved about Guna Yala, which is the indigenous Guna’s preferred name for their autonomous zone. The Panamanian government has no jurisdiction over their territory. This region is known to the West as The San Blas Archipelago.
Guna Yala lurked in the faint recesses of my mind. It was always a place of “what if” during my journey. What if I didn’t have to be in Costa Rica in four days, I could’ve biked into Colombia, and found a sail craft to take me and my bicycle across to Panama and then through Guna Yala? During that time period, FARC controlled over half of Colombia, so Colombia was a no-go for me. I had some unfinished business in Panama. I wanted to catch up with a long-time friend, and explore Panama with less time constraints.
I found the chapter on San Blas in the guidebook, and a kayak agency named Xtrop, located just outside Panama City near the canal. I also did some more research on Guna Yala, and discovered they were an indigenous maritime culture who engaged in trade and transport in either Pangas, which are wooden motor boats, or Ulus, which are handmade, ocean-going, log dugout sailing canoes. They still used Ulus for trade, fishing, and transport as their primary transport vessel. That bit caught my attention.
I have a long-time obsession with sailing canoes, particularly Polynesian proas, Southeast Asian, and Amazonian water craft. I have a nutty dream to build a sailing canoe to sail from my home waters of the Chesapeake Bay to the Amazon River basin. It’s a dream I’ve been nursing in the back of my head since 2001, when I did my first bicycle adventure across South and Central America.
According to the guidebook and their own website, Xtrop only rented out kayaks and lead multi-day kayak-camping trips in the archipelago. Because their website didn’t have contact information, I resorted to Google Maps to locate their address and phone number. Simultaneously, my old friend responded to my Facebook message.
It was good to hear from him again. We caught up via email, and I asked him a favor to call the agency and get the primary contact’s email. The next day, I had an email and a contact. Her name is Vicky Cachon, and she’s been running Xtrop for at least two decades.
I emailed Vicky, and asked her about the kayak tours. She responded that they were still in operation. Then I sent another email asking if it was possible to rent an Ulus sailing canoe. She said she didn’t know, and would ask one of her contacts in the Guna Yala.
A week later, I got an email from her that said, “yes, we can rent you an Ulus sailing canoe.” The original plan was for me and two friends to rent two Ulus sailing canoes for a five-day camping trip in the islands. After two months of back and forth negotiation, one member dropped out, which left me and my friend April.
About a week and a half before departing from Dulles airport, I put down our deposit payment. The rest of the fee was to be paid in cash at their office. All our communication was through Skype and email. I never planned an adventure this way before. All my previous adventures were in person, whether it was hiking the Inca Trail, to survival training with indigenous guides through the Amazon rain forest. I always arrived in town, found the guides, planned, and executed the adventure.
I packed with dry-bag backpacks, free-dive, spearfishing, angling, and jungle survival gear the night before my flight. Next day in the early afternoon, I walked from my house to the metro station, and in a few short hours, I was in Panama City greeting and hugging my old friend from Bolivia, and his fiance. The next day, I met up with April, who’d just arrived the night before on another flight. We then made our final payment at the Xtrop offices and met Nemesio, our guide, for the journey. He gave us an overview with nautical charts, then showed us some of the equipment that the agency provided. We already had our own hammock tents and camping gear, but we used their dual-burner stove, snorkel gear, and a heavy duty water filter pump. There was no extra charge for the agency-provided gear. Afterwards, we toured the Panama Canal and Casco Viejo, the old city, then repacked for the trip at my friend’s place.
We left at 7:30 a.m.on a 4X4 Toyota Fortuner, and stopped at a local Super Mercado and Neto hardware store to buy food and propane gas canisters. April and I bought our planned menu since we were cooking our own food. Nemesio and his crew only spoke Spanish, besides their indigenous language. Luckily, I speak Spanish fluently, which made me the interpreter for the journey.
Soon, we passed through Panama City’s traffic jams on our two-hour drive to Guna Yala. The first part was on a highway heading east. We passed through two military check points where the soldiers inspected our passports. The Panamanian government has major problems with illegal immigrants passing through their borders on their way north to the U.S. The worst was the mass human trafficking, criminality, and narco trafficking that went along with it. From what Nemesio told me, there were military checkpoints on that highway all the way to the Darien region bordering Colombia.
At the third military checkpoint, we stopped at a gas station for a snack and bathroom break, and then headed north to Guna Yala on a dirt road. The Guna nation doesn’t permit vehicles that aren’t 4X4 on the road, since non 4X4’s often end up stuck and isolated from any kind of help.
We drove for another hour. Along the way we stopped at a curandero hut—a shaman/medicine man/woman school—and some scenic points along the up and down 4X4 drive through rain forest hills. At the highest point, we were surrounded by miles of verdant rain forest, and to the east lay the blue Caribbean sea and the specks of islands of the Guna Yala. A few hills and mud puddles later, we arrived at Puerto de Carti. Our blue-painted Panga was docked where Victor, our motor boatman, and Bernd, the owner and expert of the Ulus, greeted us. We loaded our gear on the boat, and then motored to Nemesio's island, Nurdubb.
We unloaded our gear into a small gazebo with an attached kitchen, then followed Nemesio to Bernd and Victor’s family huts, where we saw the Ulus under an overcast sky.
It was 24-25 feet long and hand carved out of a log, which originally was about 5 feet wide. The beam at max is about 3 to 3.5 feet, and the freeboard is about 1.5-1.75 feet. The hull has an interesting profile. It has a canoe hull with a shallow vee, but the shallow vee ends a few feet into the hull, which becomes more of a round bottom. It has a square stern which combined with the shallow vee, allowed the canoe to cut into the waves, which Nemesio emphasized was an important feature of the boat. It also has an arcing front and rear, which kept waves from splashing into the craft at high speeds. There was no dagger or lee board.
It seated three people, and the mast is set about six feet from the bow. It used a sprit rig with a small head sail. The sail is made of canvas car tarp. The hull was freshly painted green, blue, and yellow. Bernd was excited when he heard that some foreigners wanted to rent his sailing canoe, so he painted and prepped it for us just before we arrived.
Where the sheet attached is also where the helmsman sat and steered, which made sail control a little tricky since the sheet constantly caught my PFD whenever the wind changed. In the middle, one had to practically lie in the boat to duck the swinging boom. The mast had a line which one person controlled as a human shroud.
Everyone uses paddles, while the helmsman had a large, heavy, and kind of unwieldy steering paddle. The three of us combined were comfortably able to sail the craft. Our combined weight along with day-bags, some water and daily-use gear was about 500 pounds. With that, we still had a decent amount of freeboard. The few times the wind seemed to pick up and heel the boat, only once did it look like the gunwales were a little too close to the water.
The helmsman sat at the stern with the steering paddle, and the crew, depending on the number, did either double duty as paddler or human shroud.
“We will teach you to sail this first,” said Nemesio. We will go out to a small island, and then return here. Tomorrow we begin the real trip. I will to teach you how to steer and sail the Ulus.”
Bernd showed us how to rig the sail, duck the boom, and the mainsail control. Then we rolled the boat on wooden logs into the water. Once in, we jumped aboard, and paddled out of the island and the wind shadow. Once we were out of the leeward side, a steady 3.2 knot northeasterly wind billowed the sails, and we were off on our training run.
Nemesio was helmsman at the start and he taught us how the boat handled. Then we got to an island where Nemesio and I switched. I’m not a good sailor. In fact, despite many years working on boats, I can count the number of times I’ve actually sailed on one hand. That’s four times in Boy Scout Summer camp where I failed to get my Sailing Merit Badge, and once with my friend in Bermuda aboard a nine foot Trinka. On the other hand, I’m a good paddler with many miles of canoe paddling under my belt through the years. Problem was, all my paddling was in rivers, lakes, and calm lagoons, not on open, choppy water.
I started to feel my inexperience, in the form of partially digested mixed nuts, oranges, and a greasy cheese-filled pastry from the gas station. That mix did a u-turn from my intestines, and started cruising back up my stomach. In addition, steering the sailing canoe was confusing for me.
“David, you have to turn the oar the opposite way to turn to right,” said Nemesio. We were turning to port.
“Dave! What are you doing?!” yelled April.
“I’m trying to turn to starboard!” I yelled back.
“What’s starboard?!”
“I mean I’m trying to turn right!”
The boat had no post to brace the steering paddle to. I pressed the steering paddle as hard as I could on the side, torqued it with my other hand, and if the current pushed the paddle away from the boat, I had to brace it harder on the side. Between fighting that, translating the terms Nemesio was saying from Spanish to English, the colorful discussion between me and April, and fighting the nagging feeling that my lunch was about to become fish food, I began to feel overwhelmed.
A funny thing about Nemesio and the Guna’s interpretation of sailing terms was a lack of different words for the different parts of the boat. There was no sheet, jib, leech, foot, mast or boom, though I’m sure there are Spanish language equivalents. It was super simple. Every line was soda. Every sail was vela. And he pointed his finger at the part, repeating the term. We turned right or left. Not port and starboard. Given the queasiness of my stomach and my mental battle to keep my lunch inside, keeping the terminology simple was probably the best thing.
After sailing for an hour and a half, I managed to steer us to a tiny sandbar island. I was so happy to see it, that my eyes practically bugged out as I leaped out of the canoe. We pushed the boat up the beach, and then I immediately collapsed and lay in the sand as the waves lapped my butt. A thunderstorm cut across our return route, so we rested for an hour, before I heard April say, “Dave, we’re gonna leave the island now.”
April helmed the boat on the sail back, and mid-trip I involuntarily fed the fish my lunch. Thankfully, my job as crew was to keep the boat in balance, with my head over the side, and the boom on the other. I felt better after that, while silently annoyed with myself because I forgot to bring ginger tea for the seasickness. We got back to Nurdubb, washed up in the shower of a thundering downpour, made a dinner of rice and curry vegetables from one of the premade spice packets that April brought, and then slept to the sound of waves and rain.
On day two, we woke up around 6:30 a.m. to a 4-knot easterly wind. After a breakfast of eggs and fruit, we packed and loaded up the Panga and the Ulus. It was another overcast day and we left around 8:30 a.m. During May through December, it’s Panama’s rainy season where the climate is often overcast and rainy. The Panga loaded up our gear, and we took only our small dry bags and water with us on the Ulus. Bernd and Victor motored along at a distance so we could barely see, let alone hear them, which is what we requested, while Nemesio, April, and I were in the Ulus. I was helmsman for the day. The seas were calm, no white caps, and I stayed nausea free with the physical exercise of holding the steering paddle steady while I stared at points on the horizon to keep the boat pointed, which also helped settle my equilibrium. That seemed to work.
I was much better at steering the Ulus. Meanwhile, Nemesio navigated and recounted the history and lore of the Guna nation. While steering, I translated for April. The Guna people lived in Guna Yala, as well as the northern part of Columbia, the Darien Gap, and a smaller group lived in the mountains in Panama. He also told us about the three revolutions of the Guna, first against the animals and plants in primordial times, then against the Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then against the Panamanian government in 1925. The outcome of the last revolution resulted in their autonomy. After a bloody battle against the Panamanian government, which they won, they negotiated a peace and the right to self govern without interference from Panama.
He also told us about the source of the island names, and how one of the islands was named after a battle against the Spanish where Guna warriors took Spanish heads. One of the Guna villages were incensed that the Spanish kidnapped some women and children from their village and took them to their galleon. The village organized a war party, and the warriors swam naked to the galleon in the night, and killed off the Spanish party. There were no survivors, just a lot of heads in the sand. Because of that, the island was named Heads of the Spanish in their language. An archaeological expedition went to the island in the modern era, and recovered a bunch of Spanish skulls!
With such a rich cultural heritage, we asked how the Guna were able to maintain their cultural distinctiveness in the face of the forces of modernity. Nemesio quipped that they renewed their culture through family and society. They held festivals and celebrations of their history, including a yearly Ulus race that’s held by the Guna Congress every winter/spring transition period. The Guna Congress maintained cultural continuity with the youth through compulsory education, and as families, many ancient practices were still used on a day to day basis. We saw women walking around in their native dress, with mola designs in their clothing. Much like Japan of the Meiji era, we saw women in traditional dress walking around with women in modern clothing.
The sky was overcast, and there were thunderstorms in the distance as we sailed in a drizzle.
“I think I finally got the hang of steering the boat.” I said.
“That’s good!” replied Nemesio.
Controlling the steering paddle is paradoxically complex and simple, as it's tricky to understand, but simple once you get it. First, the steering paddle goes on the side that the boom is on. If the boom is on starboard, the steering paddle goes to starboard, and vice versa. Second, you brace the paddle against the side of the boat with the same hand that's on the boom side of the boat. The opposite hand goes on top. When you want to turn in the same direction of the boom, you angled the trailing edge of the paddle opposite the side that it's on. But to turn the other way, you have to twist the paddle’s leading edge away from the craft, while holding it deep in the water, which can be difficult due to the flow of current around the paddle. When you’re doing a long maneuver opposite the side of the boom, your arms will burn.
After sailing about 12 kilometers, we saw our island destination point.
“How are we doing today?” I asked Nemesio.
“You two are doing a lot better! Usually my other students, when they’re learning to sail an Ulus, they often capsize it!” he replied.
I knocked on the side of the boat. “Let’s hope it stays that way!” I said.
We beached on the white sand. There was a small, raised gazebo with a cafe, where we met a Dutch couple who camped under a thatched open-air hut. They stared at us as we got out of the Ulus. They got there via Panga which I called an aquatic chicken bus. April went snorkeling while I relaxed a bit and studied the Ulus some more. I discovered more interesting characteristics of the craft. I found charred markings inside the boat, indicating that they still used traditional techniques along with axes and adzes to carve it out.
Nemesio said he wanted to build a replica Ulus canoe but with fiberglass and marine plywood. I told him that it would be much much lighter, and displacing the same amount, he would have much more freeboard to work with. It would carry a higher payload along with passengers. I really enjoyed the way the boat handled, and was amazed at its speed in light winds. I already had a regular canoe at home that I was modifying into a sailing canoe, but I always wanted to build my own. I thought of all the sailing-canoe designs from designers like Michael Storer and Gary Dierking, and how to modify them into an Ulus. This Ulus got me interested in making a replica of it, but with a leeboard and rudder.
April got back from snorkeling, and we had lunch in the cafe. It was $10 per person for a simple, delicious meal of rice, freshly caught fish—usually bonito or jack—and salad.
“You know what’s amazing to me about this trip?” I asked.
“What’s that?” April asked back.
“According to Nemesio, no one’s ever requested a Ulus rental before. For him, this is a way of exploring something new, and to test if this is another avenue for Xtrop to offer as a tour for adventure lovers. And it turns out that no other agency does this, either. Everyone’s kayak-oriented.”
After lunch, I went free-diving and fishing, and I didn’t catch anything. Whenever I get skunked, I make a point of talking to the locals. I asked the cafe cook, Roman, about what he used for fishing. He told me to wait a moment, before pulling out his gear.
Guna fishing gear is simple, yet effective, compared to the gear I brought, which was several hundred dollars in rod, reel, and lures. They used maybe $10 worth of hand lines, hooks, and homemade lures. My favorite lure from them was made with two hooks in a transparent piece of tubing. It could resemble either a squid, shrimp, or a minnow. He had a hand line with three hooks on it that he baited with squid or sardines. Any small fish they used as a bait fish was termed sardine. The variety of fish he caught ranged from migrating amberjacks and bonitos, to reef fish like red hinds, groupers, grunts, and chubs. There were also invasive lion fish in the reef. He told me about an American marine biologist who came for 14 days to monitor the reef for lion fish, catch them, and teach the locals to catch and eat them.
April and I made dinner of curried fried beets, sweet potatoes, and fried cheese. We set our camping hammocks out in the coconut palms, but a few hours later the wind picked up with the smell of rain, lightning, and thunder. We hurriedly moved our hammocks into the gazebo for the night while we put the tarps on the sides against the rain and wind. Then we dozed to the sounds of a tropical monsoon.
Day three, April was helmsman for the morning, and I wanted to fish, which put me in the middle with my gear, while Nemesio continued as the navigator and human shroud. After a breakfast of egg and cheese omelets, bananas, apples, and oranges, we left the island at 11:30 a.m. after being delayed by a heavy storm in the morning.
The wind speed was low, at most 2 knots, and while we used sails, we paddled frequently to get to our first destination. But the waves were higher and choppier, which made me nauseous again. Thankfully, I didn't throw up. I realized that by paddling really hard, it made me forget my sea sickness and allowed my mind to calm down. But it also frustrated April who was helming the boat. We arrived at another island that was set up for tourists, with latrines, showers, and another gazebo cafe. All the fresh water on the islands was gathered from catches they treat with Chlorox, since transporting water from the mainland is expensive.
All of us got a $12 lunch of fried fish, lentils, rice, and salad, washed down with fresh coconut juice, and a dessert of coconut meat. April and I switched positions, since she was tired of helming. I started getting nauseous again, so I stopped steering and started paddling. The waves seemed to get bigger. Or maybe my stomach got queasier.
“Dave…what are you doing?” asked April.
“I’m paddling!” I replied, as I wrestled against my stomach’s urge to chum the water with my lunch.
“We’re not going in the right direction!”
I was getting frantic as I worked to control my nausea. Nemesio, checking our orientation, lifted the boom, and then looked at me, making a karate-chop motion towards two islands in the distance. The boat was clearly going 45 degrees off from his arm. In the distance was a tiny strip of land with sparse coconut trees, compared to the other islands near it.
Nemesio said the coconuts were dying off because the managers of the island, a trio of Guna fishermen, planted a kind of stiff, Bermuda grass that consumed most of the water. The grass killed the coconut trees, so there weren’t many there. The issue for us was selecting either that island to camp on, or a more forested island, which had shade but was another two kilometers away. But, it was 5 p.m., with cloudy skies, so lack of shade wasn’t an issue. (My problem at that moment was the organ inside my ear that dictated whether to keep or throw up my lunch.)
“You’re going off course! Stop paddling!” yelled April.
“It helps me with the seasickness!”
“You’re getting frantic!”
“I know I know! I’m trying not to throw up!”
We landed on the beach and dragged the canoe up, higher than usual. Bernd dropped the sails and inserted another Guna anchor, a large sapling pushed vertically into the sand as deeply as possible, with a line attached to the boat and the post.
After we set up camp, I made some spaghetti, one of my favorite comfort foods, as a reward for a rough day on the boat. Later that night, I went skinny dipping in the cool waters in front of a clear sky, full moon, and the gentle roar of waves lapping the beach.
Day four, I woke up before sunrise to do some fishing. I tried my jig lures without any success. The pipe fish were following them back to the beach, but they didn’t take. Bernd woke up and showed me how to dig for fiddler crabs in the sand for bait. I finally got some nibbles, mainly from tiny fish that robbed my bait! Victor caught a sand diver fish, which he gave me for cut bait. It had a tough, leathery skin which made it difficult to get a hook into. Despite the better baits, I still got skunked, and while running to my camp to get my water bottle, even the crows took turns robbing my bait!
Victor, on the other hand, caught two red hinds, an amberjack, and a rainbow runner. After the morning fishing session, we had breakfast of leftovers, bananas, oranges, apples, and washed it down with a tang mix of maracuya. Then we sailed to another island 2 kilometers away for a snorkel tour.
It was more densely packed with coconut trees and had lots of shade. There was also a lot more beach detritus—driftwood, coconut palms, some trash, and sea shells. April and I agreed that we made a good choice camping on the other island. One thing I noticed about the islands is that in general, the locals were pretty good at cleaning up their litter. Trash is burned, and whatever trash that might be functional for something, was repurposed. There are no recycling facilities, and transport of garbage would be expensive, fuel-wise.
We harvested a bunch of coconuts from some low-lying trees, while Bernd and Nemesio gathered a bushels worth. Nemesio said that coconuts were used as currency in the islands, and they’re worth more than dollars.
Afterwards, we went on our snorkel and free-dive tour along a large reef which was easily the highlight of the trip. The reef was super healthy. We didn’t see coral bleaching anywhere, and an enormous amount of life swam by us. There were soft coral fans, brain corals, anemones, sponges, the works. We swam by schools of grunts, chub, while watching rainbow runners dart by. There were massive, 100-foot-long schools of minnows, while conch snails crawled lazily along the floor. Black sea urchins hid in crevices among the corals, while butterfly fish and wrasses darted in and out of their coral homes like apartment buildings. I brought with me some fish ID cards, but on seeing the sheer amount of life, I got overwhelmed and said, “You know what? Just enjoy the tour.” I put the card away.
As we snorkeled from shallow to deeper water, about 20-25 feet deep, I started free-diving into schools of much larger fish. Sometimes I passed by large jacks or a grouper. On the way back to the island we swam into a shallow area that was 2 to 3 feet deep, with a field of fan corals swaying in the current while angel fish pecked around for food.
We swam back to shore, where we gathered firewood for the camp from the driftwood piles, and then sailed back to the island. The return trip was much more difficult, and for the first time, we almost capsized when a gust of wind broadsided us into a reef while Nemesio was moving about the boat. We tried to tack back to the island, but barely made any progress. I was helming during the tack, and I found myself fighting against the strong current. Bernd motored near us in the Panga, and said we would take several more hours just to get back. So he threw us a line and towed us back. The Ulus was well-behaved under tow.
We got back, rested, and then I went for another snorkel tour on the reefs next to our island, which were just as impressive as the coral reefs at the other one. This time, I was on the hunt for dinner with my spear-pole. I free-dove down to about 20 feet, looking for something sizable to spear, preferably a lion fish or maybe a hogfish. But I got skunked again. I did see some substantially large amberjacks, chubs, and jacks milling around, so when I got out of the water, I told Bernd, who suggested we take the Panga and fish that section. Victor found a conch that he smashed open, and then he cut the snail meat into strips for bait. We motored to where I saw the large species, but all we caught was a squirrel fish, which I fried and had with rice and coconut meat for dinner.
I set up a fire pit in a hole from the rotted stump of a coconut tree, and built the fire structure. We all gathered around the fire while April tended it, and Nemesio recounted more Guna lore, which I found interesting because some of the stories involved people who came from the stars.
At around 3 a.m. the winds picked up like crazy, and thunder rumbled nearby. Luckily, the storm didn’t land on us. The next morning I woke at sunrise to try once more to catch something. I finally caught a silver palometa on a Sabiki rig. I was skunked no more!
Nemesio was monitoring the wind conditions. He said the prevailing winds would make it really difficult to sail back, so we agreed it was best to motor back in the Panga. Along the way, I tried the local native technique of using a clear tube and two hooks to troll with and finally caught my first decent-sized fish, a bonito. Bernd caught an amberjack on his hand line.
We motored to a small sandbar to do one more snorkel tour. I thought I saw the distinctive red shell of a spiny lobster and went back to the boat to retrieve my spear. But it disappeared, and in the process, I accidentally got my thumb punctured with a sea urchin spine. Nemesio said to smack it around to break up the spine and it would eventually dissolve out.
We motored back to Nurdubb where I cooked everyone a Vietnamese fish-fry dinner with our catch. Nemesio brought the village’s native red rice to cook as well. I blended fish cutlets with lemon grass, garlic, salt, and fried it in hot oil, while Nemesio prepared a dish of red rice and coconut meat. As we enjoyed dinner, I gave my thanks to Nemesio, Victor, and Bernd. Afterwards, I reflected on the adventure. We did 32 kilometers in 3- to 4-knot winds one way. Not bad. Not bad at all.
After a spectacular sunset, sleep, and then sunrise, we motored back to the port for pick up by the 4X4 back to my friend’s place, where I got ready for my rain-forest jungle trek. I thought about Nemesio’s invite to participate in their upcoming Ulus sailing race. He said I got the hang of steering and handling enough for him to have me aboard. That felt like an honor, and an opportunity. For sure, I will be back.
Stats about the Ulus Sailing Canoe
LOA - 25’
LWL – 24’
Beam – 3’6” (varies depending on the log width that’s dugout)
Draft – 5-6”
Weight – Estimated weight 300-400lb
Sail Area: Sprit Sail Rig, unknown sail area.
About the Author: David Nghiem is an entrepreneur, newbie sailing enthusiast, engineer, and longtime bicycle adventurer with a strange obsession for sailing canoes. Which is why he logically got himself a Blockley Privateer 20 trailersailer—it comes with oars—that he’s learning to sail in the Chesapeake Bay. He’s attempting to combine human and sail power into a craft to sail to the Amazon…so we may hear more about his future adventures.
I visited the San Blas islands by cruising sailboat in 1981, so I really liked reading this piece. Wonderful detail and made me feel the place again. While there were no restaurants there then, so glad the Guna Yala are holding on to their culture while getting some income from visitors.
Nice article. Thanks!