A Coming-of-Age Ceremony in the San Blas Islands

The San Blas Islands of Panama form an archipelago along the Caribbean coast of Panama, east of the Panama Canal. We were headed to these islands late on a stormy night in an open boat not designed for ocean travel. It was the late 1960s, and this was a training mission for our para-SCUBA group headquartered at Fort Gulick in what was then Canal Zone. The purpose was to train a new group of divers in protected ocean waters and to accustom them to decompression dives. We were in a Higgins boat, the landing craft that ferried troops from ships onto the beaches during World War II. They were made by the Higgins Boat Company of New Orleans and designed to run up close to a beach–square bow and flat bottom. Consequently, they pitch badly in a rough sea. Since there is no cover, a tropical rainstorm comes right in, and a 75-mile trip from the Canal Zone gets long. One nice feature is that a tropical rain is warm, and one can sleep in it on a cot overflowing with water. <a href="https://medium.com/travel-memoirs/a-coming-of-age-ceremony-in-the-san-blas-islands-afa7ea5037f2">Click Here</a>