Boat schooling, exams and Holiday time!

Mid-November brought us a weekend away in Colon, about a 2 hour drive from the Marina where we left the boat. Colon marks the eastern end of the Panama Canal, which we will be prepping to transit over the next few months, so it was exciting to see it from land and appreciate the scale of the Canal, the volume and size of the boats that are constantly transiting and the fact that we will be amongst it soon!

Colon itself was a pretty crappy town to be honest, one long street of shiny, duty free ships aligning the Radisson where we stayed and the cruise ship terminal, but quickly deteriorating into un cared for buildings, streets where the man hole covers get stolen - so you have to be on your game as you drive around - and a very industrial feel to the port town. It was a far cry from Panama City, at the other end of the Panama Canal, which we experienced later in the month, with its huge, modern high rise towers and sprawling streets.

Our mission for the weekend was to get Annabelle to her SAT exam venue, a beautiful International school set a few miles outside the heart of the city.

Our children follow the US school system and are all enrolled in fully accredited online private schools. However, as a Year 11 student (a Junior), Annabelle is required to sit a small number of exams in person. The first of these was the SATs, which can be taken at accredited testing centers around the world. In May, she will need to fly back to the US to sit four AP exams (AP stands for Advanced Placement, a program created by the US College Board that offers college-level curricula and examinations to high school students in the US). All of our children’s other exams and assessments are completed online, sometimes with a proctor as they get older.

This is a far cry from the traditional correspondence-style homeschooling that some families once followed, where students worked through printed materials and mailed completed work back for marking before receiving the next set of lessons. One of the most positive outcomes of Covid, in our view, has been the significant improvement in the quality and credibility of online schooling. Without these advances, or without Starlink of course, we simply wouldn’t be able to travel and live the way we do while continuing to work.

We have also felt very strongly that our choice of lifestyle should never limit our children’s future options—whether that means going to university, pursuing careers that require formal qualifications, or choosing a completely different path. That is our perspective. Through our travels over the past few years, we’ve met families from all over the world, each taking a slightly different approach to education on board. Some follow online schools with live Zoom classes; others teach from workbooks aligned to one curriculum, or a mix of several. Some families focus only on English and maths, while others actively “unschool,” believing that immersion in the world around them will naturally develop the skills their children need.

Whilst we waited for Annabelle to finish her exams, we found a wonderful cafe to sample Panamanian coffee (which is grown near their border with Costa Rica in the mountains so was wonderful!) and breakfast, get much needed haircuts and provision in a big city for once. We had an ‘end of exams’ celebration in a great sushi restaurant that evening, followed by weird face masks in the hotel, Annabelle accidentally tried lung for breakfast the next morning :( and headed back to the marina the following day for some more rounds of boat work as we continue our Pacific crossing prep.

From the original survey of our boat in early 2023, we knew we needed to replace the lenses on all our hatches. Some were already leaking, others looked like they were about to, and after several months of buckets under the worst offenders 🙂 we decided to replace the lot—for both comfort and safety. As with most boat jobs, some took five minutes, while others required several hours of swearing and stomping. A safety thing as well as the new lenses look so nice!

We also bought four new lithium batteries—definitely not a job we’d hoped to add back onto either our list or our budget. Ours were only two years old, but one had failed, the manufacturer had since gone bust, and you can’t mix lithium battery brands together. So, four brand-new shiny batteries it was, all installed properly and safely.

Finally, we had to haul the boat out for a weekend-only job to replace two through-hulls that exit our black water tanks (where the toilets empty) when we’re on passage. These are the largest holes in the bottom of the boat, controlled by valves, and they had started to leak very slightly—definitely not something you want on your conscience before crossing an ocean. Given the source of those pipes, it was also one job we were more than happy to pay someone else to handle!

And then suddenly it was time for Christmas! We have a little tree that we decorate and on the day had a wonderful full English fry up with home made Stoke-inspired Oatcakes on the side.

On Boxing Day we had a traditional Cricket match on the beach with a load of Aussie friends which was was really good fun. It was lovely to spend the time in the sun with friends relaxing. We were also privileged to have another local Guna come on the boat to sell some molas to us, each one is unique and tells a story about their life or their customs and with the colors and the effort that has gone in it is hard not to buy all of them! A lovely treat with some Christmas money!

We then topped off the year with a fun New Year’s Eve celebration on the local island, at Ibin’s restaurant. He used to be a private chef and we have met people from all over Panama and Colombia who were incoming to the San Blas for his New Year’s celebration. He did a fantastic buffet dinner including Lobster, ceviche, curries and salads and some amazing desserts for 200 people, rounding off a pretty cool year off with a cool fireworks display that we watched from the boat.

Now onto new levels of logistics and administration preparation as the New Year starts, as we apply for our French Polynesia Long stay visas, submit our paperwork to get permission to enter the Galapagos Islands on the way across the Pacific, and prep the paperwork for the Panama Canal crossing in February. All that before work, school, boat preparation and provisioning begins!!!