Once past the canal, we motored to Shelter Bay on the West side of Limon Bay of the Caribbean Sea. We past a reminder of that description of the ocean as a cruel mistress.
We found Shelter Bay to be disappointing, but it has one most important feature: location. It is not in Colon--a city with one of the worse reputations for street crime we have encountered. Shelter Bay is technically in Cristobal and felt safe enough. Its principle drawback is that it takes a long cab ride to get across the canal into Colon to provision. Fortunately for us we had provisioned at Balboa on the Pacific side of the canal. We met Tina McBride’s Caribbean side representative nick named Dracula and dropped off our line handlers there.
The marina itself is modern, clean, and well run. It has a small restaurant, a modest chandlery, and a travel lift. It would be a good place to keep a boat South of the Atlantic hurricane zone for the summer. Just don’t expect to find much of the cruising life.
As it turns out one of our crew John Eichinger had visited the site when it was Fort Sherman. He was a midshipman at the Naval Academy on his sophomore year summer cruise. When we met up with Paul Cahill later in Bocas we learned that he had taken his tropical warfare training at Fort Sherman as preparation for a tour with the Special Forces in Vietnam. Small world ain’t it? We stayed for two nights and left without regrets.
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