Ala Michalka writes for Conde Nast Traveler.

The sun was about to set, and my fingers were sticky with pineapple and mango as I boarded a Zodiac to return to our yacht, moored a few hundred yards off the Costa Rican coast. I’d been smuggling fruit from the cooler all day during our expedition into the Lapa Rios nature reserve, unnoticed by the rest of the group, who were riveted by our guide’s sightings of toucans, macaws, squirrel monkeys, boa constrictors, and iguanas. His hearing was so sharp, he’d known exactly what creature was prowling the forest floor or making the leaves quiver, and would excitedly lunge ahead with his telescope to point it out.

Now I was looking forward to my favorite time of day on this seven-day sail from Puerto Caldera to Panama City: the late afternoon, when my husband, Stephen, and I would climb down the Wind Star’s teak stairs and swim out alone to one of the rafts floating behind, the scent of fruit and rum from the bar hovering on the salty air. Treading water while looking at the huge white hull and treelike masts, I understood why people fall in love with boats and never want to see a place any other way.

I’d imagined we’d have to fight for prime desk space. In fact, the bow was nearly always empty, and we’d stand, with a firm grip on our drinks, letting the wind blow us back onto our heels. While everyone else seemed to flee to the AC-filled lower decks during the day, I spent long hours at sea reading by the ship’s teal blue pool and wooden bar. Once, we tendered ashore for a beach barbecue and, spotting the rows of plastic chaises on the sand, snuck away across a rocky channel to an isolated cove where we took off all our clothes and swam naked, barely making it back to the beach before the tide rushed in.

The only time we saw all of the other passengers was the morning we sailed through the Panama Canal. One older woman in a big yellow sun hat told us she’d booked the trip so she could see the canal before she died. And the sight was moving: Floating under the high-arched Bridge of the Americas, and slowly clearing each of three locks, it was hard not to think about how completely this narrow band of water had changed the world, with food and spices and cars now floating between Africa and the Pacific.

The canal is a means to a distant end, but our trip finished here. The upside was that it left us in Panama City, one of our favorite places. That night, we walked the streets of Casco Viejo, the 17th-century neighborhood whose peeling colonial facades are painted in candy colors. Salsa streamed out of the bars. We ate coconut soup and roast chicken at chef Jose? Carles’s Donde Jose?, and somehow I wound up mixing drinks at the Strangers Club, opened by some alums of New York’s Employees Only. Later, walking back to our hotel smelling of pineapple and coconut, I smiled to feel the sway of the ocean still in my legs.

The Wind Star‘s pool bar at sunset with a mix of napping swimmers and apertif-sipping passengers.

We saw empty coves flanking the main beach at Isla Parida, one sandy and one rocky, so we snuck off early. (You have to let the staff know so you don’t get left behind!) Returning later, we had the main beach, with the swing and some adorable dogs, to ourselves. You could also hike the rainforest here, which is filled with indigenous birds.