From the www.seawing.be website, good to hear that nobody was hurt. Special news: During the night of the 28'th of March at 01:00 am, African Seawing was boarded by 3 man while anchored at Club Nautico in Colon Panama. My two crewmembers where away that night with a New Zealand boat as rope handlers to assist with a Panama canal transit. The buglers had swum the 170 yards from the nearby beach only wearing boxer shorts. They confronted me in the bedroom flashing a light in my eyes. I didn't hear them come. While shouting "police, police, dineiro, dineiro" they took me by the neck as I was pointing to the place where the wallet with dineiros were. Obviously that money was not enough and they wanted to know where the safe was. Not wanting to escalate the situation, I gave them the key's and pointed out the safe. I was not allowed to open the safe. At this point they tie wrapped my hands and I had to sit down. For the next half hour they searched the whole boat throwing everything to the floor. When the search was over one of the buglers tie rapped also my feet. At that moment I thought, this is it, they are going to kill me. Luckily that fear was wrong. All they wanted was buying time. Like a caterpillar I crawled the 3 steps up the stairs and found a scissor to free my feet and a steak knife to free my hands. Stepping outside I discovered that the dingy was gone from the davits. The dingy was found later stranded on the nearby beach full of water . The dingy must have been sinking since the drain plugs were removed when it was hoisted on the davits earlier that evening. It took the police half hour to respond to the 911 call, due to language confusion and misunderstanding of where I was in Colon. Further delays were encountered waiting for a police boat in order to reach ASW since no dingy was available. A very short unprofessional inquiry was al that followed, neither did the police return any time thereafter. The loss was many thousands of Euro's in cash and electronic equipment. After waiting for 2 days, not having received a police report or a follow up response, we took ourselves the initiative to obtain the official documents of the robbery assisted by a local translator. We also will inform noon site so other cruisers will be warned about this dangerous corner of Colon.
when I was there, we went "uptown" to check out the bars, on leaving one bar, we were standing on a corner and looked up the street to see another place with lots of flashing neon, as went to step off the sidewalk, an armed military soldier came up, stopped us, raised his hand and a cab pulled up, go back to the yacht club he said otherwise you will have your throats cut tonight, we did as we were told, this was a year after the US invasion and Colon was a total dump, the old Washington Hotel was still a nice place though.
Hi, Colon has always been rough and dodgy. We were going towards the free zone in 1984 and passed an old fella sitting on the steps of a house , he ran his finger over his throat showing what would happen to us further down the street. We kept walking but did take a cab back after we had bought our stuff.
With the amount of money that flows through that area one would think they would clean it up, I guess it's mostly commercial vessels that don't disgorge hundreds of thousands of passengers , so, why worry about the yachtsmen.
