As the summer yacht charter season nears its peak, several popular charter fleets have added yachts in destinations all around the world.

In the Bahamas, Fraser just welcomed the 107-foot Burger Silver Seas. It’s a 1998 build that most recently was refitted in 2022, and that will base in the Bahamas all year round. Accommodations are for eight guests in four staterooms that can be set up for families or groups of couples. This yacht charters with an Intrepid tender for watersports fun.

Up in New England, Edmiston has welcomed 168-foot Feadship Acta to the charter fleet. Acta is a 2007 build that accommodates 10 guests in five staterooms. Equipment includes Quantum zero-speed stabilizers for guest comfort at anchor, and the yacht has a wheelchair-accessible elevator and side deck. The master stateroom is on the bridge deck with expansive views.

For charter clients seeking more exotic locales, IYC has just added the 131-foot Westport Rule No. 1 to its fleet, with inquiries being accepted through September 2025 for Panama, Mexico and Costa Rica. Rule No. 1 is a 2011 build that most recently was refitted in 2023, with accommodations for 12 guests in five staterooms. This yacht charters with a 37-foot Freeman tender for fishing, and has toys that include an inflatable slide.

Also available farther afield is the 75-foot Sunreef Diana, a sailing catamaran that’s in French Polynesia as part of the Y.CO fleet. Diana is a 2017 build that just completed a refit this year. The yacht accommodates eight guests in four staterooms. Amenities and crew services include a hot tub, a fitness trainer, a masseuse, a yoga instructor, and various water toys.

In Croatia and the West Mediterranean, the 137-foot Kingship Ocean’s Seven has joined the Fraser fleet. This is a 2012 build that was most recently refitted this year. Interiors on the yacht are by Vripack, with five staterooms for 10 guests. The master spans the full beam on the main deck and has a king-size berth.

Are there any options being advertised for scuba diving? Indeed, Edmiston says the 154-foot Feadship Lady Victoria is still accepting inquiries this summer in the Bahamas, and is offering scuba diving right from the yacht. Accommodations are for 12 guests in six staterooms, with a master that has its own deck and a VIP on the main deck. The swim platform can be extended and raised for diving, or submerged for guests who want to step right into the sea.

How to book a week on board: contact a charter broker at fraseryachts.com, edmiston.com, iyc.com or y.co.

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Panama’s Tropic Star Lodge

There’s something uniquely special about awakening before daybreak in a Central American jungle, more than a hundred miles from the closest road, knowing that a gourmet breakfast awaits you. Even better, you rise with the knowledge that just offshore of this beautiful oasis in which you find yourself, in the calm waters of the Pacific, huge game fish prowl the reef just a few miles from where you sit enjoying your morning coffee. This combination of isolation, impeccable service and great fishing opportunities can be found in very few corners of the world, but it’s something many of us seek. And for a growing number of people, the place offering the most complete combination of all of these things is the world-famous Tropic Star Lodge in Piñas Bay, Panama.

Piñas Bay lies at the southeastern corner of Panama, just a few miles from the Colombian border. This natural, protected harbor has served as a stopover for seafarers for hundreds of years, providing shelter to everything from pirate ships to merchant vessels plying the waters of the central Pacific Ocean.

Adventurous American fishermen soon discovered another attribute of the Piñas Bay area — spectacular fishing. Pioneering anglers such as S. Kip Farrington and the Schmidt brothers first visited the region in search of black marlin in the late 1930s and ’40s and noticed a specific spot that held an unbelievable amount of marine life. A military survey conducted after World War II identified the spot as a prominent section of reef just off Piñas.

Currents from all over the Pacific Ocean converge offshore of the bay over that natural reef, later mistakenly referred to by some as the Zane Grey Reef after its alleged discoverer, though Grey never actually fished there. The reef attracts large schools of Pacific bonito and skipjack tuna, and this abundance of bait attracts large predators, namely black and blue marlin, Pacific sailfish, dorado and yellowfin tuna.

Texas oil tycoon Ray Smith built a lodge on the shores of Piñas Bay in 1961, and in 1965 opened its doors to the public as Club de Pesca. It wasn’t long before world records began to fall as anglers flocked to this pristine area, previously accessible only to a privileged few.

Piñas Bay’s notoriety grew rapidly — Sports Illustrated magazine did a feature on the lodge in 1963, showcasing the area’s tremendous fishing opportunities to an entirely new international audience. Then, in the mid-1960s, a Hollywood film producer shot a short documentary on the lodge and its fishing, attracting the attention of even more people.

Ray Smith died of a heart attack at the lodge in 1969, and it was later purchased by Edwin Kennedy, who renamed it Tropic Star Lodge. Then, in 1976, Conway Kittredge of Orlando, Florida, purchased the lodge, and his family operates it to this day. Kittredge’s daughter Terri and her husband, Mike Andrews, have continually developed Tropic Star, maintaining the resort as a first-class hotel in the middle of nowhere — not an easy task.

There are many unique features to Tropic Star, but from a boating standpoint, its fleet of fishing boats may be the most interesting. The Andrewses have assembled a fleet of 15 Bertram 31s. The 31 has earned an enviable and justifiable reputation as an offshore fishing workhorse, and the Tropic Star fleet runs 11 months of the year, rain or shine, a testament to the enduring practicality of this famous Bertram design. As you would expect, running a lodge in a remote jungle is like running a small city. When things break down out there, you also need to know how to fix it yourself. Toward that end, Andrews has built an impressive boatyard on site, complete with machine and carpentry shops, a marine railway and enough spare parts to rebuild an engine in a matter of hours.

I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Tropic Star several times and have experienced great fishing and superior service on each trip. Raleigh Werking serves as marketing director for the lodge and is also a partner in the operation. Werking is a skilled light-tackle angler and has set numerous world records fishing around Piñas Bay over the years.

On one of my trips with Werking, I discovered a whole new aspect of fishing possibilities at Tropic Star — incredible inshore action exists there as well. We spent several days next to shore, never venturing the few miles out to the reef at all, and we caught a tremendous variety of fish, including roosterfish, cubera snapper, bluefin trevally, crevalle jack and African pompano. We even took a yellowfin tuna less than 100 yards off the rocks!

Of course, I’ve also experienced fantastic offshore fishing. While Piñas Bay offers excellent action for Pacific sailfish, tuna and dorado, its claim to fame is marlin. There’s no better place in the eastern Pacific to catch a black marlin, one of the most highly prized big-game species in the world, and the fishing for big Pacific blue marlin is outstanding as well.

Captains at Tropic Star excel at marlin fishing and have perfected using live tuna for bait. To accommodate this technique, Andrews designed a custom livewell system. This unique setup combines a conventional center section for smaller baits like goggle-eyes, which can be used for sailfish, with six tuna tubes located around the perimeter of the center well.

Each morning, the 31s head for Zane Grey Reef to catch bait from the huge schools of tuna. The small tunas caught on the bait rigs are placed headfirst into the tubes, which force clean salt water over their gills, keeping them amazingly healthy for long periods of time. When the captain’s ready, the mate removes a tuna from its tube and fastens it to a large circle hook with a bridle. The tuna goes overboard and is slow-trolled alive, as the anglers wait impatiently.

It often doesn’t take long for a hungry marlin to appear in the bait spread. The panicked tuna usually alerts you to the fact that he has company, and the bite can be spectacular as the large billfish engulfs the bait. If all goes well, the circle hook finds the corner of the marlin’s mouth after a brief drop-back, and then the fight is on.

Watching a black or blue marlin greyhounding behind the boat as line dumps off the big-game reel at a furious pace ranks as one of the most exciting experiences in the world. Zane Grey may have found it first, but now you too can experience such a thrill, and at the end of the day return to a luxurious oasis carved out of the middle of the jungle. These things make Tropic Star Lodge truly unique.

Tropic Star Lodge, 800-682-3424; 407-423-9931 (outside of United States); tropicstar.com

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Charter yacht Ladyhawke

Panama

Panama

Panama

“Did you see the canal?”

“Did you buy a Panama hat?”

These were the recurring questions our landlubber friends asked after we returned from cruising in Panama waters last winter and spring. And we always replied with an enthusiastic yes!

But for us, Panama will always be its Pacific islands, with their tropical beauty and sparse settlements. This slender thread of a country has 720 miles of coast on the Caribbean side and 1,048 miles on the Pacific; a width varying from 50 miles at the narrowest to 118 at the widest, and more than 1,600 islands, the majority of these on the Pacific side. The most popular group for visiting yateros is the Archipiélago de las Perlas, the name arising from what were once rich beds of large pearls.

We’d been sailing Carricklee, our 45-foot Hardin ketch, south from California along the Pacific coast of Central America. Before heading to the Panama Canal, we decided to explore Panama’s Pacific archipelagos. Passing Punta Mala, Panama’s elbow of a point, we motorsailed all night the 70 miles across the mouth of the perilous Golfo de Panama. Twenty-plus knots of wind, only 30 degrees off the bow, collided with a swift current that had whipped the seas into a wild confusion. With no designated lanes charted for ships entering and exiting the Canal Zone, radar blips were approaching us from all directions.

After an essentially sleepless night, we gazed on the southwesternmost area of the Las Perlas, Isla San José, with much the same awe as the poet John Keats imagined “stout Cortez” to have experienced when, after becoming the first European to cross the Isthmus, he “star’d at the Pacific/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

Dropping anchor off Playa Grande, we quickly surmised we had found our first pearl. The wide white sand beach was rimmed from one end to the other with a dense thicket of rich green mangroves, their spidery roots exposed by the low tide. Azure waters of the cove frothed up in white plumes on the reefs and pinnacles that protected the anchorage from the sea.

Tired from our night sail, we took a long nap and awoke just as the sun was dropping behind the island. Ashore, thousands-no, tens of thousands-of sea birds were flocking onto the beach as the tide receded. Elegant terns, Franklin’s gulls, brown pelicans and olivaceous cormorants vied for patches of sand-pushing, shoving, flying with squawks of protest. The birds continued to swoop over the bay for one or two more silvery nibbles before the daylight was gone.

The next morning it was high tide and the shorebirds were gone. We set out by dinghy to explore, crossed an embankment and came to an estuary where blue herons and snowy egrets stalked the shallows, looking warily at us. We looked just as warily-not at the harmless birds-but at the large claw prints, a dragging tail track between them, coming out of the water. A caiman, the small alligator common to the tropical estuaries of Mexico and Central America, was nearby. The prints led across the sand bank toward the bay, where they disappeared into the water now washing over the birds’ haven of last evening. We surmised the caiman had had a picnic not many hours earlier.

Late that afternoon, two fishermen in a panga, the sturdy fiberglass fishing boat ubiquitous in Mexico and Central America, chugged slowly alongside Carricklee, careful not to bump our hull. As one of the men held aloft a sierra, a tropical mackerel we had come to relish, we asked what it would cost. But the men shook their heads in unison. Out for several days of fishing, they had no immediate need for cash. When we offered Cokes and baseball caps with U.S. logos, their shy smiles expressed satisfaction with the trade.

Over the next few days, we continued to find new little gems, with one beach more beautiful than the next. Anchored between Isla Pedro Gonzalez and Isletilla de Don Bernardo, we had a view of a stretch of white beach rimmed with coconut palms, their overlapping fronds thick, alluring fans of green swishing in the breeze. Only as we approached by dinghy did we see a small house. The sole occupant of this sweet little cove was an 83-year-old man, whose young wife had chosen to remain in Panama City. Walking the length of his beach at low tide, we gathered shells for our collection and one special treasure, a muricanthus, its spines intact and the black and white striations vivid.

A day later we found a beach that seemed to have been draped in silk tie-dyes of soft pinks, roses and magentas. The magic of Bayoneta Island arises from its millions of scallop shells. We spent over an hour walking the length of the beach, in search of perfection, finding it only to discard those shells for the next batch.

Next was Isla del Rey, the undeniable “king” of the Perlas in terms of size, with more popular anchorages than any of the smaller islands. Off Espiritú Santos, on Isla del Rey’s north side, we found eight other boats, yet had our choice of spots in which to drop anchor. Given that the wind was blowing consistently in the 20-plus range, the stillness of the water astonished and elated us.

We eagerly accepted an invitation from an American couple, from the sailboat Mamouna, for a group excursion through one of the several estuaries that wander inland. We set off in three tenders up into the wide mouth of one waterway, peering around each turn like explorers.

Once we turned off this main channel into one of the arms reaching into tangles of mangroves, it was as if we’d come in out of the storm: no wind, no waves-just silence. But as our ears cleared from the clatter of the motors, we began to pick up sounds: crackles and pops from the roots and low branches of the mangroves; higher up, the creaks of limbs and branches rubbing together like unoiled hinges; and, from the tops of the trees, the soughing of wind through the leaves.

Drifting more deeply into the narrowing channel, we watched colorful Sally Lightfoot crabs crawling along the exposed roots and low branches of the mangroves. Flocks of whimbrel and white ibis flew up ahead of us, then circled back to land in the trees behind us. Scanning the soggy banks for caimans and the tree limbs for snakes, we felt both disappointed and relieved not to see any.

Eventually, the channel constricted to no more than a shallow, limb-strewn slough, and we retraced our track, squinting as the mangroves gradually retreated on either side of the sinuous estuary to let in the light.

Too soon, we needed to hasten on to Panama City. We’d been out of harbor for over a month with only minimal replenishments, fresh fish and a few tropical fruits here and there. To break up the 60-mile passage from Espiritú Santos to Balboa Yacht Club, we anticipated one more stop, at Isla Contadora. Some may remember Contadora as the meeting place for a Central America peace initiative, others as the place of exile for the late Shah after the Iranian Revolution. In colonial times the conquistadors stopped here to inventory their booty before returning to Spain-thus the name Contadora, from the verb contar (to count).

Contadora is another jewel of an island, with picturesque coves and sugary beaches. This pearl, however, had become a bit too polished for our tastes. The anchorages were crowded and hotels lined the beach. Overhead, small airplanes shuttled the 40 or so miles between here and Panama City. All these facilities are, to be sure, important.

But our Panama lay behind us, in the less-traveled islands.

Panama Is Your Oyster

You don’t need to bring your own boat to sail Panama’s Las Perlas archipelago. Ladyhawke, a 63-foot trimaran has been based there ever since her captain, Ross Kleiman, fell in love with these islands, bought his own boat and set up Panamaniac Charters. Ladyhawke can take up to 10 guests and charters for about $1,000 per person, per week. If you’d like, Kleiman can also arrange trips to the jungles of the Darien Gap (www.panamaniac.net). Panama Yacht Tours has a fleet of sportfishermen and one 118-foot trideck motoryacht (www.panamayachtcharters.com). For a shore stay or just an excellent meal or fresh local fish and organic produce, try the luxurious “eco resort” Hacienda del Mar (www.haciendadelmar.net). The Panama Guide by Nancy and Tom Zydler, remains the best cruising guide.

The post The Pearls of Panama appeared first on Yachting.

Expect the unexpected in Panama. Where else can you find the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean and setting in the Caribbean? It is an illusion, of course, engendered by the peculiar geography. The scrawny, rawboned isthmus comprising this little nation has been wrenched sideways from the continent’s otherwise southward plunge, as if the gods had tried to twist South America off the North American vine.

One of my favorite places on earth, Panama translates roughly from the Indian as “lots of fish.” So I was excited to be joining Bertram Yachts’ José Millan for a cruise here. My last expedition had been in the company of Felix and Lydia Gonzalez on their 37 Bertram TiTi out of David, the Pacific port city for Chiriqui. A perfect example of how extraordinary Panama can be, David (Da-VEED) squats on the humid coastal plain, one hour north of Volcan Barú, the nation’s highest peak at well over 10,000 feet, in a nearly Alpine setting.

I have also had the pleasure of fishing off the fringe of Darien around Piñas Bay, where the fish are so abundant it staggers the imagination. Tropic Star Lodge, a world-class resort tucked into an otherwise impenetrable rain forest, maintains a fleet of modified Bertram 31s there. (Remember the old ad slogan, “The sun never sets on the Bertram empire”?)

This was to be yet another adventure, a cruise through the Archipiélago de las Perlas, the fabled Pearl Islands, starting from Panama City-founded in 1519 by Pedro Arias de Ávila.

The city prospered as the Spanish used it as entrepôt for the looted treasures of the Inca Empire, which were then transshipped to the Caribbean side on overland trails and thence back to Spain by groaning galleons. It was a city well fortified from attack from the sea. They never thought about the back door.

In 1671, the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan divined the opportunity, muscled his way through the jungle and surprised the city from behind. He sacked, looted and burned and made off with a 200-mule train loaded with treasure.

The Spanish moved the city to a much more easily defended narrow point of land today called Casco Viejo. The ruins of the old city, Panama Viejo, are well preserved in a park-like setting along Via Cincuentenario. They are very impressive, if somewhat clumsily shored up in places by modern brick. The very tip of Casco Viejo is the Plaza Francia, an extremely pleasant place for an evening stroll. Across the bay you can see the twinkling lights of the Bridge of the Americas as it crosses the Pacific end of the Panama Canal.

I met up with José at the Bertram dealership, Evermarine, which is situated in the spanking-new Marina de Isla Flamenco out on the causeway that flanks the entrance to the Canal. Proprietors of this enterprise are Louis and Geno Sola, transplanted Hoosiers.

Our plan was to explore the nearby Pearl Islands in three Bertrams, a 67, a 51 and a 48. The 67, a gorgeous blue-hulled boat named Acqua Belle, was the queen of the fleet. Accordingly, we chartered a fourth, older boat, from the father of Octavio Arias, Evermarine’s operations manager and scion of a very old Panamanian family, and gave chase.

From the sea, Panama City’s explosive growth was even more impressive. High-rise buildings sprout from everywhere. There are still some dangerous neighborhoods, but prosperity is crowding them out. “This is the Dubai of the Western Hemisphere,” Louis Sola told me over dinner one evening. I believe him.

The Pearl Islands are so named for a good reason. When Vasco Nuñez de Balboa found the Pacific Ocean, he also heard stories of the pearls harvested from oysters nearby. His successors managed to kill off the Indians in short order and had to import slaves to help harvest the nacreous treasures. So numerous were they, the Spaniards established a counting house, or contadora, on the large island nearest to the mainland-the same island where Jimmy Carter formally handed over the canal and where Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the deposed ruler of Iran, found temporary refuge.

The Pearls are a 15-minute flight from Panama City, or a boat ride of an hour or two. The weather usually is not a factor, given that the Pacific is usually that: pacific. That is, calm.

Less than an hour out, we encountered our first treasure. One of the many local shrimp boats was hauling its nets. Capt. Adam MacKenzie, our skipper, asked if I liked shrimp. “Are you kidding?” I said incredulously. “I’m an old South Carolina dude.”

He then brought our craft within hailing distance and in short order, the mate, Cedeño, bartered four packs of Winstons and a six pack of Coke for 15 pounds of fresh, headed shrimp. A little farther on, we were hailed by another shrimp boat. A crewman needed to go home for an emergency. They offered another 15 pounds of shrimp if we’d take him to Contadora. No problem.

After dropping off the crewman, we headed south through the archipelago. The other three boats scattered to their whims, chasing fish or dreams or both. We found ourselves staring in disbelief as we cruised through pods of pilot whales that were being ghosted by orcas-while manta rays belly-flopped and birds screeched over schools of bait fish being chased by everything from dolphin to tuna.

Let me say this: Fishing off the west coast of Panama will spoil you for fishing anywhere else. You’d have to be truly stupid or inept not to catch fish almost anywhere here. When I fished with the Gonzalez family out of David, we played around the offshore islands, Parida and Montuosa, and on down to fabled Hannibal Bank. We caught dolphin, yellowfin tuna, bonito, snapper, sails, a hefty Pacific blue marlin and even rainbow runners while jigging off a seamount.

The most amazing fishing I’ve ever experienced was along the jungle border with Colombia near Piñas Bay around the seamount called Zane Grey Reef. My first day there, we had 60 sailfish bites, with 30-some-odd wired and released. In one day, mind you.

Tropic Star Lodge claims more broken IGFA records than anywhere else in the world. (You may stay and book a boat through the lodge or bring your own yacht and anchor out; www.tropicstar.com.) There is no real dead season, but prime fishing for black marlin is December through April, then the sails move in. Marlin return in July. There is year-round angling for roosterfish, grouper, snapper, rainbow runners, yellowfin tuna, cubera snapper and corvina around the mouth of the Jaqué River. As with all fishing, real success depends on bait, water temperature, winds, etc.. The onset of the rainy season in late April usually brings in the shoals of baitfish.

Birds were everywhere. I have never seen so many frigate birds in one place in my life. Back on the isthmus, I watched a great cyclonic gyre of them spiraling above hordes of sardines. Here, they circled over nesting grounds and joined pelicans in pursuit of food. Yellow-footed boobies skimmed the waters. Squadrons of cormorants profiled the waves.

As we came down the western side of Isla San José, the wind began to pick up. We were coming out of the Gulf and into the edge of the Eastern Pacific and the southerly flow was piling waves onto the shore. Our destination that evening was Hacienda del Mar, a small, rustic but luxurious resort perched on the cliffs.

We passed the guardian islets of Isla Marin, Tres Pilas de Arroz, and Isla de Hicaco into a tight little bay that in most circumstances would be a lovely anchorage. This evening, it bore the brunt of the breeze and was quite choppy.

High on the jagged rock we could see the main lodge, a thatched building constructed after the fashion of an Indian great house. The surf was ferocious, lashing against the cliff. To the left, we could see a lovely scimitar of beach overhung by coconut palms.

Capt. Adam blew the boat’s horn until we finally saw some sign of life. He made fast to a mooring ball and we waited while a small white inflatable made its way toward us. José and I hastily repacked, stuffing enough clothing and shaving tackle for one night into a small duffle and depositing our valuables in my Pelican camera case because it is watertight. We assumed we’d get wet.

Amazingly, the two young men who came to fetch us managed to get us ashore with only wet legs, backing the inflatable into the five-foot surf and expertly grinding us up onto the beach. We jumped out and they went back to get Octavio. Capt. Adam and his crew elected to take the boat around the corner, out of the wind, and anchor there.

We found paradise. This has to be one of the most charming little hotels in the world. There are only 14 rooms, all of them in individual cabins constructed from local materials and cantilevered out over the cliffs, overlooking the beach and the sea. An infinity swimming pool was the centerpiece of the terrace. The dining room was on the second floor of the lodge, with sweeping views. We opted to eat on the balcony outside in the soft air and lambent light. The food was almost as good as the view.

The next morning, we walked around the grounds and listened to raucous macaws shrieking in the treetops. I was trying to photograph some little green parrots on a feeder behind the kitchen when I felt something nibbling gently on my toes. I looked down and beheld a curious toucan.

Later, when I went back to my cabin to pack, I found two toucans on my balcony. They were completely unfazed by humans.

It was with great reluctance that we left this exquisite corner of heaven. I have to tell you that you may reach it by airplane. The resort has its own private little airline that comes into a jungle strip discreetly hidden away. But come in by boat: It’s more fun. And if your yacht is large enough and the wind is calm, anchor off. But as you will want to come ashore for drinks and dinner, be sure to make reservations (www.haciendadelmar.net).

We caught up with the rest of the fleet again back at Contadora for a brief exchange of anecdotes. They spoke of sailfish and marlin and tuna. We told them of toucans and whales and manta rays and orcas with dorsal fins like the sails on attack submarines. Nobody won that battle of the tall stories. It was a happy draw.

Contact: Bertram; www.bertram.com

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