We have the habit of making highly questionable decisions in November. Multiple times we have ended up offshore in the North Atlantic about this time of year…or later. This year, we are staying put in the tropics, fiddling around with the boat and exploring Panama by land and sea. Perhaps our decision-making is improving?

To honor this progress, I offer a short video of me keeping watch last November…

…in contrast with this photo of our current neighbor, Ms. Sloth.

I will leave it up to you, Dear Reader, to determine if we are headed in the right direction. I honestly can’t tell if this is the right way or what. For now I suppose the thing to do is make like a sloth and hang in there.

Although I frequently describe myself as a pilgrim, I had never participated in an actual pilgrimage until earlier this month. I suppose now it’s official.

The festival of the Christo Negro (also called as El Santo, El Naza or a variety of other local names) is held annually on October 21st in the coastal town of Portobelo, Panama. The event is centered on a pilgrimage, which draws participants from throughout Central America, with many arriving on foot from Panama City or Colon, the country’s main hubs.

By walking these distances through the tropical heat, pilgrims seek atonement. Many crawl the final mile after entering town, with companions who brush the ground before them, pour candle wax onto their bare skin, and offer cries of “No dolor! No hay dolor!” as encouragement to cast off physical suffering for spiritual redemption. Also known as the “pickpockets pilgrimage”, it is rumored that career criminals will participate to wipe the slate clean each year.

Ultimately, pilgrims arrive at the parish of Iglesia de San Felipe, to seek blessings at the feet of the venerated statue of a cross-laden black Christ, carved life-sized from cocobolo, a dark, tropical hardwood.

The coastal town of Portobelo is a slim, humid crescent, braced at each end by Spanish forts built of coral blocks hewn from the reefs that border its well-protected bay. Historically, the town rose to global prominence in the late sixteenth century when it replaced the nearby town of Nombre de Dios as the Caribbean terminus of the Spanish Silver Train. It was here that mule trains would deliver the vast wealth extracted from South America, funneled overland across the Isthmus of Panama and onto colonial treasure fleets for the Spanish crown. The English pirate Francis Drake, having recently sacked and burned Nombre de Dios, succumbed to dysentery just outside of the bay. He was buried at sea within sight of Portobelo, in full armor.

In the modern era, the town is a cultural locus of Costa Arriba, the “upper coast” of Panama. This region is rooted in the Afro-Panamanian “Congo culture”, descended from the cimarrones, who were African slaves that rebelled during the Spanish colonial period and built a distinct culture here. Congo culture is on display throughout the town, in the forms of visual arts, dance, dress and food.

Descending into Portobelo on this day, having walked for hours with an ever-increasing cadre of villagers, it looks like a massive carnival – thundering music, dancing, street food and (lots of) drink. With tens of thousands of visitors overwhelming this normally sleepy town, visitors have camped on the roadside and pop-up kitchens are everywhere. The only hint of the piousness at the core of it all is the slowly moving line of purple snaking through the crowd. Those pilgrims that are here for the main event are clad in purple robes and cords, a reference to the story of Christ being mockingly draped in royal garb on the road to Calvary.

At the doorway of the church, the structure itself trimmed in bright purple, the pilgrims cast off their robes, along with it their spiritual burdens. As I stepped over the threshold, I too, turned my thoughts to the blessings to come.

If you already know that I live on a boat, it may surprise you to learn that I have a true phobia of deep water. Luckily (ha) I get a lot of opportunities to work on this particular irrational (or is it?!?  arrghhhh!) fear.

When I see from our charts or from our depth sounder that we are in very deep water, I get a chill in my blood as soon as the realization hits me.  It never fails. I imagine how small my boat is, and how we are just a speck in the infinite, and the infinite is full of sea monsters layered like taco dip for fathoms below.

This has happened enough times that the response has lessened, my blood more room temp, and now I just remember that we have done this before.  Our boat is so tough, and if we just let it carry us, we reach the next shore.

It is the repetition that retrains my brain.

Another aspect of this phobia is that I cannot  – CAN NOT! – look upon the underside of a boat while it is in the water.

During our courtship, F and I would go to boatyards and walk around looking at the wide array of boats, mostly up on boat stands and under repair.  I called this “hullgazing”. During the refit(s) of our own boat, I got up close and personal with our hull, scraping, sanding, glassing, and – at long last – painting.

That very same hull, floating in water, fills me with such horror that I had not looked upon it once in the 4 years we have owned her.  My reptile brain must see it as an orca.  (Was I orca food in a past life?)

Now that we made the jump over to the crystal clear waters of the Bahamas, I had to divulge this facet of the phobia to F, and sheepishly ask him to come watch me jump overboard for the first time.  So he was treated to the graceful sight of me flopping over the side, flailing my limbs around (one second of which he captured in a deceptively tranquil photograph that I immediately circulated on social media) and then scramble my way back up the boat ladder.  Step one complete.

Over the past few weeks I have returned to the water, first applying swim fins and mask, then circumnavigating the boat, and finally, looking briefly back at the boat from underwater.  Each step jettisoned me back to the cockpit, gasping and soggy.

Yesterday, I admired the hull of our boat for the first time, even inspecting the anchor for good measure.

Fear is worth examination.  With attention and time, it is possible to disassemble these bombs and move past them.  What do we gain access to when we have less fear? For me, this impacts my sense of safety, my ability to come and go as I please.

And I am sure that before long, F will realize that he can now ask me to help scrub the hull.