Rain!

It's raining here in Panama City, more than cats and dogs, more than pigs and chickens, more like elephants and camels! The noise of the rain on the tin roofs is deafening. We are waiting for it to abate before continuing our taxi trip for check in.

No hope to stay dry in this place!

We arrived in Panama City yesterday and are anchored at Las Brises along with SV Three Sheets. Today we hired Alexis the taxi driver to schlep us around to do our check in. The first stop was the port captain, who is located at the Flamingo Marina, just down the street.  We had to purchase a one year cruising permit for $193 (US dollars), plus a fee of $20 for the boat.  There is no option for a shorter term permit even though we plan to leave in about two weeks. Ouch.

Next stop was immigration located at a place called Diablo. We filled out some forms, one with information about the boat and one form for each of us with passport and nationality information. After completing these forms we were told to go to the immigration office at Balboa Yacht Club. As we stepped out of the building we saw the rain as in the photo above. Wet! We waited a bit for it to subside and then Alexis drove us to the yacht club. We found the immigration office was the size of a closet surrounded by tires for use when transmitting the canal, oil drums, trash, cats, etc. we knocked heavily on the door, waking the poor fellow so he could look at our paperwork, stamp our passports and some of the documentation from the previous office. We walked down to the yacht club office where they made copies for us, then dropped off a set of copies with this office,  found Alexis and then back to the other office. Here we sat and waited until it was our turn, and paid  $100 each for our visas plus $20 fee  for who knows what and we were finally checked into Panama, $400 plus dollars poorer and it took from 9 am to 3 pm to get this done.

Alexis dropped us off at the Rey's super mercado and we paid him $60 for schlepping us around. We had a late, late lunch and did a little shopping before catching a taxi back to the dingy dock. The dingy needed to be bailed out from the rain but we made it back to Windarra.

Tomorrow is Saturday so we plan to do a little exploring. Hopefully it will not rain as much.

Damp in Panama.