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My crew and I left Grand Marina in Alameda last October 9th, and cruised down the coast of Baja about a week after the Ha-Ha 2000 fleet. Cruising is about choices. Having grown up in hot, dry, and brown southern Idaho, I chose to skip the Sea of Cortez after a visit to La Paz, and head south where the anchorages are green and tropical. Ever since Mazatlan, I've been cruising solo. Sometimes I stay in places for just a day, sometimes I stay for a month or longer. A question that lingers in the minds of most cruisers is what would happen if they had a serious medical emergency in a remote area of the world. Well, I had one in a remote section of northwest Panama. I had to put all my trust in the local population, and they couldn't have treated me better. While anchored on the north side of Isla Parita - which is one of a group of islands on the northwest side of Panama - I had some bleeding in my bladder. It clotted, shutting down all operations. Thank goodness there were some cruisers nearby to lend initial assistance. I had been buddyboating since Puerto Vallarta with Charles Grassia of Sayula, another singlehander.

. John Anderton was born and raised in Utah until the age of 15, when his father decided it was time to leave the city and move onto a dairy farm in Southwestern Idaho.  In 1968, at the age of 28, John left the farm and moved to Silicon Valley to find employment in the emerging computer industry.  For the next 22 years, he worked in the computer departments of several hospitals in the San Francisco Bay area.  In 1989, after three years attending sailing classes and chartering sailboats, he sold his condo, bought a sailboat, and lived aboard until 2000, when, at the age of 60, he quit his job as a Data Base Administrator at Stanford Health Services of Stanford University and sailed down the coast of California into early retirement. . Additional Resources Unique Lifestyles  Articles on Living Overseas  Latitude 38 Online  Contact John Anderton . .

The hospital experience was a bigger ordeal than it would have been had I been fluent in Spanish, but the doctors had all been trained in the U.S., and the staff of the 300-bed regional facility were excellent. I'll spare everyone the details, but the total cost for my six days in the hospital - including IVs, 12 x-rays, an exploratory look around my insides with a camera, the surgery under anesthesia, and all medications - came to just US$390! Furthermore, an emergency room nurse gave me a ride to the local Price Costco, so I could use the ATM machine to get some money to pay the bill.

It took me two days to arrange for transportation back to my boat - which proved to be another adventure. I used the two days to formally check into Panama, and stayed in a very nice and clean hotel for US$16.50 a night. On the second day, the manager from Pedregal Marina drove me to the main bus terminal, and gave instructions on where I needed to go to a ticket vendor. After three hours, the vendor put me on the correct bus - and passed on further directions for me to the 

busdriver. After a 20-mile ride on the Pan American Highway, the bus driver flagged down a taxi, which drove me 12 miles down the single lane dirt road back to the fishing village at Boca Chica. Thanks to the help of the taxi driver, I was able to get the attention of an English-speaking young man, to ask how I might get back to the island and my boat. The young man took me to the front yard of a house where a dozen men were doing a number on four cases of beer. It was decided that some of them would take me back to my boat - after they finished the cases of beer, of course. So there I sat, with US$500 in my pocket, waiting with a group  of Spanish-speaking strangers - all

of whom had machetes – to finish their cases of beer. None of my friends or family knew where I was. Everything worked out fine, however, as my medical ordeal had become common knowledge in the community. As for the machetes, they were for snakes. I now have my own machete. Finally, they weren't really waiting to finish their beer to take me back to my boat, but waiting for the tide to change. No problema, mon. 

I returned to Isla Paridita to find that my boat was the only one left in the anchorage. All the other boats had moved on four days before. Nonetheless, my inflatable was still on the foredeck, my outboard was still on the stern rail, and nothing had been touched. I spent most of the next two weeks sitting on the boat regaining my health. During that time I did some visiting with the locals and a young ex-pat couple on a nearby island. Twice I dined with them in a setting of bamboo huts and dirt floors - the whole rural Third World scene. Several other times the locals stopped by for a visit in the cockpit of my boat. With the help of a Spanish dictionary, we exchanged the stories of our lives. I was happy to be able to stay in touch with my cruising friends through the morning radio nets, and they were happy to hear that things had worked out well for me in the hospital.

I returned to the hospital for a check-up, once again riding to the town of Pedregal in a panga - but this time it was a delightful, pain free trip. After a good check-up at the hospital, I joined the sailing vessels Poets Place and Germania 2 to continue exploring this interesting region of Panama for another two weeks. I finally left these two boats behind at Bahia Honda, and sailed solo over to the Las Perlas Archipelago, which is to the northwest of the Panama Canal.  I'm currently at the funky little Pedro Miguel Boat Club on Miraflores Lake inside the Panama Canal. I'll be leaving my boat while I return to the Bay Area and then travel to Portland for my daughter's wedding. The adventure continues!

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