Why this new sailing ship may be the ultimate way to explore Costa Rica and Panama

Propelled by the power of the wind

Exploring the Pacific side of Costa Rica

Our sailing down the coasts of Costa Rica and Panama begins in the sleepy Costa Rica port town of Puntarenas, on the Pacific side of the country. But we don’t stay there long.

Just hours after passengers arrive at the ship, which is tied up all alone at an otherwise empty dock, Sea Cloud Spirit sets off on a six-day exploration of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast — a region known for ecotourism of all sorts, from spotting monkeys and colorful birds in national parks to zip lining through lush rainforests and horseback riding along unspoiled beaches.

After rounding Costa Rica’s famous-for-its-surfing Nicoya Peninsula, Sea Cloud Spirit points northward toward the northwesternmost corner of the country near the border with Nicaragua.

It is here, after a day of cruising under full sails, driven by the power of the wind alone, that we land at Playa Panama — a secluded and quiet crescent of dark sand beach that serves as a gateway to nearby Palo Verde National Park.

After motoring to shore in Zodiac boats, many of the ship’s passengers head to the national park for a boat ride through its marshlands in search of monkeys and crocodiles, as well as the many colorful birds for which it is known. Others visit a hacienda for horseback riding with the local cowboys and zip lining through the surrounding forests.

Off-the-beaten-path Panama

After six days along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, Sea Cloud Spirit drives southward into the waters off Panama, where our first stop is the cluster of 39 islands and islets that make up Panama’s Coiba National Park.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the mostly uninhabited island group is known for its untouched rainforests and wildlife that exists nowhere else, such as the Coiba Island howler monkey. But for our purposes, it serves mostly as a place to stop for a beach day as we land by Zodiac at one of its many sandy beaches for snorkeling and sunning.

Unlike many of my Sea Cloud Spirit compatriots, I skip the snorkeling, scared away by a warning in the ship’s daily planner about the occasional presence of plankton and jellyfish in the water that send out “stinging microscopic harpoons.” But I find diversion in a small one-room national park visitors center just off the beach that goes into great depth on its flora and fauna.

It is here that I learned that the particular island where we landed, the island cluster’s main island of Coiba, once served as a penal colony known for brutal conditions and the disappearance of political prisoners during the dictatorships of Panamanian strongmen Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega.

Two days later, after another full day of sailing down the coast, we get a second beach day with snorkeling at Mogo Mogo Island, part of another cluster of islands and islets off the Panama coast called the Pearl Islands.

Here, I brave the plankton and jellyfish stings to wade out past the rocky shallows to snorkel the edge of a coral reef teeming with foureye butterflyfish and honeycomb trunkfish.

Not only is the water crystal clear and the fish lovely, but it is an outing that I survive without a single strike from a stinging harpoon (several of my snorkeling companions, alas, do report such strikes, though they say it’s not terribly painful).

The marvel of the Panama Canal

The next day of the trip brings an adventure of a different sort as Sea Cloud Spirit transits through the Panama Canal.

Passengers line the teak walkway in front of Sea Cloud Spirit’s bridge early in the morning to watch as the vessel glides through Balboa Harbor near Panama City to the start of the canal at the Miraflores Locks.

It is the first of three sets of giant rectangular chambers that will lift the 4,228-gross-ton vessel up and over the Continental Divide to the Caribbean, and it is a sight to behold.

After we enter the first of the chambers, seven-story-high steel gates slowly swing shut behind us, and the basin begins filling with millions of gallons of water. At 1,050 feet long, the lock is roughly the size of three football fields — so long that a second cruise vessel, the 100-passenger Emerald Azzurra, fits into the chamber behind us.

More than 100 years after its construction by the United States, the 48-mile-long Panama Canal remains a marvel of modern engineering — and an alluring attraction for cruisers on trips to the region.

As passengers learn during an onboard lecture the day before our transit, thousands of workers toiled for a decade to carve the passageway out of the dense Panamanian jungle. In addition to building giant locks at both sides of the canal (near both the Pacific and Atlantic entrances), its builders had to construct what at the time was the world’s largest dam along the Chagres River, which in turn created one of the world’s largest man-made lakes.

Dubbed Gatun Lake, the 21-mile-long body of water makes up a significant part of the waterway vessels use to cross the country.

Sea Cloud Spirit spends much of the day crossing the canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic as the ship’s onboard lecturer, Stephen Weston, offers a running narrative from the top deck.

The entire process of moving between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans takes just seven hours.

The indigenous people of San Blas

The final stop on this trip is the San Blas Islands, a sprinkling of several hundred mostly uninhabited spits of white sand and palm trees that rest off Panama’s Caribbean coast.

Controlled by the Kuna, an indigenous people spread across three politically autonomous reservations in Panama and Colombia, the islands are mostly off-limits to tourists and undeveloped for mass tourism, as the Kuna like it. But the Kuna allow small groups of visitors, such as those aboard Sea Cloud Spirit, to visit occasionally.

Anchoring off the Kuna-inhabited island of Wichub Wala, we tender to a small dock to wander the sandy paths between the Kuna’s bamboo and palm leaf huts, past the dugout canoes they use for fishing.

It is, for many passengers, an opportunity to purchase a souvenir from the trip that is hand-made and local, as the women of the village line the pathways hawking the colorful needlework panels called molas that they make both for their own use (traditionally, they sew them onto the fronts of their blouses) and for tourists.

Molas that we’re told take weeks to make sell for about $15 to $20.

The brief visit to Wichub Wala also includes a short dance performance by the Kuna in their main square before we are back on the tender to the ship. It is a morning stop paired with an afternoon call at another sandy island for more snorkeling and swimming.

The trip ends the next morning in Colon on Panama’s Caribbean coast.

Bottom line

A voyage along the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and Panama on Sea Cloud Spirit is an intriguing way to see the highlights of both countries in a single trip.

One of the biggest passenger sailing ships ever built, Sea Cloud Spirit takes a go-slow approach to travel down the coast from Puntarenas, Costa Rica, to the Pearl Islands of Panama, followed by a daylight crossing of the Panama Canal to the Caribbean side of Panama. Along the way, it visits several of the most popular tourist areas in the two countries and offers passengers a relatively rare opportunity to experience the joys of sailing the region on a tall ship.

One caveat about the trips: Sea Cloud Cruises, which is based in Hamburg, Germany, has a big following in Germany, and its Sea Cloud Spirit sailings often are heavy with German speakers. That said, the vessel’s onboard program is bilingual (the relatively rare number of announcements on board are made in German and English, and most of the staff speaks both languages). You’ll likely find at least some English speakers among your fellow passengers.