My friend, Frank, has always said, “I see you in Bocas del Toro. It’s a natural for you.” So, on my first couple of visits to Panama I would ask people who said they’d been to Bocas how they liked it. The answer, almost invariably was, “I don’t know. It rained the whole time I was there. If you read my post yesterday you know how it can rain here. Well, it started last night about seven and it’s 7:25 a.m. and it’s still raining. There isn’t the wind like yesterday but it’s blowing out of the west today instead of the south.
I’m supposed to go back to David today but in order to do that I have to take the 20-minute water taxi ride to Almirante. The closest taxi is three looooong blocks away from the hotel and everything I have would get soaked. And after you get to Almirante you have to stand at the side of the road to catch the bus that takes you across the mountains. I’m just going to have to sit here for a while and make a run for it when the rain stops for a while.
I can see why the rainfall amount here is nearly 11-1/2 feet in a year. One of the people I had lunch with yesterday said that the rainfall in the first 10 days of May this year had already equalled what fell in all of May last year. It seems that it rains for five days out of every four in Bocas…and yes, I did say five days out of four.
One More Good Adventure 
When I lived on Kwajalein, it *only* rained 8+ ft a year. Many of us found the best rain gear was a set of Frogg Toggs ™ – pants and jacket. What makes them special is that unlike conventional raingear, they breathe so that you don’t get wetter from sweat than from the pouring rain. The best rain gear I’ve ever seen. Of course, who takes rain gear on a 3 day trip, eh?
Eight feet of rain? That’s a desert compared with this place. This morning, though, is beautiful. Sun shinning, a nice breeze from the WNW at about 5, the mountains off in the distance. You should have seen them yesterday afternoon. Thick, white clouds down low with the peaks rising high above them. And I mean good sized mountains, too. Volcan Baru a ways to the south is 11,393 feet high.
I’m definitely going to check out the Frogg Toggs when I get back to the States this weekend. I need some light weight, breathable gear.
Back when I started working on boats (1972) I got a good set of Heely Hansen commercial fisherman rain gear. It didn’t breathe or any of that other good stuff, but man was it rugged. It served me well when I was racing sailboats offshore (I was in the Inaugural Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race and the second one, too), and it stood up to the rough work in the oil patch in Louisiana, too.
Want some fun? Go spend 12 hours on a 47 foot boat in a norther with the temperature near freezing, raining like stink and put guys on and off high-pressure natural gas and oil wells in eight to ten foot waves.
That gear got covered with crude oil and drilling mud over the years and stood up to everything. I think I finally tossed that set after about 15 years of rough usage.