Bahía Piña is one of the last anchorages in Panama before you cross the border into Colombia. It is pretty and protected from northerly winds (though not from southerly wind and seas). 
It has a couple of anchoring options, though like many places a mooring field has crowded out the best spots in the best area. It's certainly safe: the Panamanian Navy has a prowler based here that patrols the Colombian border. Get a load of their launch, painted to look like a killer shark:
There is a small native village on the side of the bay opposite the Tropic Star Lodge and its mooring field. Everyone's friendly and we hear you can buy a few food items there but we'd provisioned well in Ecuador and we were too busy with repairs to make a visit. This time.
After sleeping off the 693-mile passage from Ecuador, we began to assess the equipment failures we'd experienced underway. We got lucky yet again.
Our foresail had not torn; we found that it was just the sun cover that had shredded in a few areas where I'd we'd
neglected to repair sun-damaged, broken threads. It was a fairly simple matter to drop the foresail, clean up the unraveled bits, pull the sewing machine onto the deck, and to the amusement of the local populace who came by in their dugouts to watch, re-stitch the failures. While we were at it, we examined the whole sail for any more broken threads and repaired all those by hand. "Nip it in the bud" is our new sail repair motto.
GB got to work on our faithful autopilot, that had continued to function but was making unpleasant noises and making the helm unusually stiff. Long story short, GB read the manual (OMG! Yes! I know!), did a "factory reboot," and the autopilot responded with much happiness and gratitude. Lucky.
Same thing with the engine: in non-choppy waters, we did not experience the small gaps in the engine's water intake that had been happening while we were bouncing our way in to Bahía Piña. Everything checked out fine and functioned fine, so…no problem, I guess, as long as we stay out of heavy chop.
Meanwhile, between chuckles over my sewing techniques, the local village women and girls showed us their bead work, basketry and wood carvings. Why yes, I did buy a souvenir, thanks for asking. After all, they deliver right to your boat, by dugout. We're likely to be back this way and if we do, I'll do it again. These folks have style.
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