Scouting Out the Entrance

April 12, 2025   

The day before we planned to take our sailboat into the San Blas Marina inside the lagoon we launched our tender and took Kiki over to the lagoon entrance to check it out.  We were very glad that we did so, because when we first saw the entrance area, it looked incredibly ominous.   

With swells rolling in from the south it was perfect for the surf breaks in the area, but it also placed a large surfer's wave on either side of the lagoon entrance.  Travelling along well outside of the break line, we motored along in Kiki, bobbing up up up and over the large sets of swells that were rolling in.  We watched as they built and built, then crested, and spray went flying backwards off their tops.  It was beautiful, but quite threatening.  

Our GPS charts showed buoys that were no longer present to mark the channel of safe water that enters the lagoon.  Now, only one buoy, part way in, showed the way. 

We watched as two pangas ahead of us waited to time a small set of swells before entering the channel, because although the waves in the channel were not cresting, they did build to be large and very steep.  We followed the second panga in and figured out the best path through the entrance, and then we watched from the inside as another set of large swells rolled through and towering cresting waves shouldered the built up swells pushing up the channel. 

We would definitely want to time our entrance well.  As we were coming in through the channel in Kiki there was a guy with a helmet on who caught a wave on his surfboard beside us.  It was weird to be coming through a channel with people surfing waves only one hundred feet to our side.  Both sides of the channel were common surf spots when the south swells were rolling in. 

We explored up the channel of the lagoon and scoped out the deep-water channel.  It was a beautiful area with mangroves and sand / mud beaches on one side and the town on the other.  Lush green trees grew right up to the edge of the water and children and chickens were running around in people's yards. 

We checked out the marina, the slip that we were supposed to come in to the next day, and the channel into the haul-out area. 

We had a small handheld depth sounder that we used to check the depths and got an idea of the width of the channel.  The high tides for these days were going to be around 8:30 in the morning and 8:30 at night. We wanted to come into the lagoon and into the slip at the end of a rising tide, so our two options were morning or night.   

The obvious choice was morning, but we had been told that it could be very foggy almost every morning.  Since we had been anchored in the Matanchen Bay anchorage, however, we had only seen fog over the lagoon area once, and it was on a cooler night.  The forecast was for a fairly warm night, so we decided to hope for little to no fog and planned to go in in the morning.