Saturday – Sea-life – Arrival in Panama

Today was another sea day, and the second of my watercolour sessions. Things went a little more smoothly this time around on account of knowing what we had to play with and being more organised in sorting the materials out in preparation for the class. I had the group applying the simple washes we learnt in the first session to a beach scene with simple figures (the beach in Manta).

Between classes, I’ve spent some time working on online student stuff, and Tracey has been attending a few of the onboard lectures (I joined her for Neil Bonner’s talk ‘My Life with the Stars’, which was highly entertaining, as always…).

We were also thrilled to see some significant wildlife on two occasions today. After breakfast, while sitting on the back deck, we saw a pod of dolphins following the ship. They were brilliant to watch, as they were extremely lively and clearly very happy, jumping up out of the water and playing around…

Later, after lunch, as we were relaxing with a cup of tea up on deck, one of the officers came past and gave us a tip-off that a whale was in the vicinity. Naturally, everyone dashed to the top deck to look for it, and was pleased to see its spout a few times as it broke the sea’s surface.

This evening, as the sun was setting, we dropped anchor just a short tender ride away from Flamenco Island, within sight of the magnificent Panama City skyline, which emerged out of the haze rather spectacularly. We’ll be spending the day here tomorrow, via tender boats before heading up the Panama Canal on Monday. Tracey and I are on tour tomorrow (a tour both of us are really looking forward to…), so an early night is in order (which turned out not to be so early because we were sat updating our blogs…)

We’ve both been suffering a little from the sunburn we picked up in Manta; hopefully we’re past the worst of it, though (and we keep telling ourselves that the itching, prickly skin is because we’re ‘healing…’).