If that's the place I'm thinking of, my cousin bought a bunch of acres on a small island that's accessed by that little town and built a house on it. My memory is failing but I think he said it was about a 20 boat ride from Bocas to his island. I don't know if he still owns it since he and his wife moved back to Florida and he took up gainful employment....LOL!
I didn’t fly to any of those places because we pretty regularly heard that planes had “run off the runway” which meant “ended up in water”. In those days I didn’t fly in anything that wasn’t flown and maintained by the US military. Which is too bad because I really did want to fish Tropic Star just once (and almost did with a couple friends who did go). But we did go just about every place one could drive to and visited about every island I could with my boat. Several times I would call the hotel on Contadora and book a room for the weekend and dump my wife and daughter on the beach with the suitcases while my son and I went fishing.
My first year there I did a massive amount of scuba diving along the coast around Portobelo. There used to be bunches of young kids with 30 foot canoes with an outboard who would carry you out several hundred yards into about 60-70 feet of water and then follow your bubbles and pick you up. $5 for a “boat dive”. An enterprising guy built an open air “restaurant” near Portobelo where the scuba divers would go and drink after diving. “Los Canyones”. He was a good guy.