Panama, Colon and Panama Canal - Jan 2007
We had good wind all the way from Porvenir in the San Blas Islands to Colon, athough as we knew, we would arrive at Colon in the dark. The wind and sea were pelting us downwind by the time we got in sight of Colon harbour, it was a worry keeping the sails up into the harbour, but trying to get them down in that sea was not a welcome thought. We made it into the smaller harbour entrance and dropped the sails. As Colon / Cristobal harbour is the entrance into the Panama Canal, there are lots of tankers and container ships anchored outside the harbour, and in the dark we had to be sure which ones were moving so as not to get in their way. In fact only one or two were any worry. In the harbour we followed the buoys to “The Flats” anchorage, and anchored well at the upwind end of the anchorage, nearest (but not that near) to the Panama Canal Yacht Club, which was to be our base for the next few days before we would go through the Canal.
The bureaucracy and paperwork to be completed in Panama is unreal. We spent four days going to see one office or another. This included immigration (again) where we were obliged to buy 90 day visas, which no-one will ever look at, a visit to the admeasurer to organise the canal crossing, followed by the visit of the admeasurer to the boat for measurement and inspection (he didn’t turn up the first day so another day was wasted). We had to visit the port authority twice, once to check in and once to check out, and then we had to organise tyres and ropes for the canal. All this by taxi because the area outside the Club, among others, is not safe.
Along with all this we managed a couple of big supermarket trips to start stocking up, and we caught up with email etc which we couldn’t do in San Blas.
We had to find three extra people to be line handlers for the canal crossing, you need a skipper and four handlers in case you have to transit centre chamber alone, which can occur even if planned otherwise. In the end we hired them, three young guys who had a lot of transits behind them and mostly knew what they were doing. In addition an adviser comes on board every small vessel, to co-ordinate the yacht with the other vessels and the locks. We were booked in to go through the Canal on the evening of Sunday 28th January, completing the transit on Monday 29th.
Finally the day arrived and we were ready to go. We picked up the line handlers Marco, Eric and Joel at 1pm and they got familiarised with the boat and then played cards until the adviser, Oswaldo, arrived at 4.30 pm. Oswaldo was friendly and easy to get on with, we left promptly to motor into the channel leading to the locks. It was decided en route that we would be rafted up to a large American yacht, Sorcerer II, which would itself be in the sidewall position. This meant that apart from tying to the other boat, we would have no lines to handle. It was getting dark as we entered the lock, in front was a not-so-big tanker, with lines behind it attached to special trains on rails beside the locks. We were behind and tied to the large 80ft American yacht, which had two lines to the sidewall and was thrusting off the wall with powerful bow and stern thrusters, and behind us was a smaller 55ft American yacht which was centre chamber, i.e. they had four lines to control.
When everyone was in, the gates behind us slowly closed. Within a minute or two the lock started to fill, it is filled from huge pipes underneath, creating a lot of turbulence, eddies and whirlpools. It is imperative you do not fall in as you cannot be rescued! In 15 minutes we were ten metres higher, the rise stopped, and the lock gates in front of the tanker opened. The trains pushed the tanker forward - it didn’t use its engine, which was one worry less for us. Apparently the smaller ships are easier to control this way. We stayed nested to the American yacht, which drove us through and we started the same procedure again.
As we had so little to do, we organised our meal in the locks and fed everybody at a respectable time. We finished the locks at about 8pm and motored the short distance to the mooring buoys in Gatun Lake (fresh water) where we were to tie up for the night. The linehandlers slept two in the cockpit and one in the hammock on deck. The adviser was picked up by launch, he said his day job was maintenance engineer at the Miraflores locks the other side, and he would wave to us tomorrow!
The night was fine but windless, there were no mosquitoes. We woke early and fed everyone, and our new adviser was delivered by launch at 6:30 the next morning. This one, Camillo, was not particularly friendly but he was ok. He directed us through the lake, going through smaller channels and scenic islands where possible. Soon though we were back in the main channel which was shared with large vessels, and several large ships passed us, going the other way. The trip to the next locks was about 25 nautical miles, and we had 5 hours to get there, so 5kts was about all that was called for. We had been worried for days because yachts are supposed to declare they can do 8 kts, otherwise the charges are much higher. We can do 8 kts but the engine wouldn’t like it for long! The North to South transit is usually split into two days for yachts so this is not so critical, but the other way round they try to fit them into one day.
The second half of the freshwater passage is through the Gaillard Cut, where land was hacked away to make the waterway. Many thousands of people died building the canal, and it was sobering to pass through this place.
At 11:30 we arrived at the Pedro Miguel locks, which was a single descent. We tied alongside the large American yacht again. Going down we didn’t have the turbulence, it was like the tide going down very fast. We untied to motor the short distance to the final locks, the Miraflores locks, which has two descents. We tied alongside the American yacht for the first descent. Then the day’s adviser on the large yacht said we should separate to go into the final lock. This turned out to be a bad decision for us!
The final lock is where saltwater and fresh water are mixing. Our adviser told us that in the lock we would encounter a strong counter-current, which would have been easy to cope with. As we motored towards Sorcerer II which was already made fast Nigel was trying to slow down, but a three knot current and twenty plus knots of wind being funnelled through the lock all from BEHIND did their best to push us on down to the lock gates. Nigel knew that any significant amount of throttle in reverse would spin us beam on to wind but was told by the advisor to Go neutral and Go reverse anyway….Then we were sideways, still travelling at 2 or 3 knots with not much room to manoevre with Sorcerer II narrowing an already tight gap. With large steering and throttle inputs Nigel managed to get the bow round head to wind and current and Eric managed to get a line from our bow to a man on the wall and with good fendering by the crew we were safe albeit facing the wrong way! Elaine the human fender saved our pulpit from a sudden crunch as the boat was pulled around, and sorted out our fenders. The linehandlers adapted to take care of the ropes, and very quickly the water started to drop. As the water lowered our spreaders were very close to the wall, and so were our solar panels on our rear spreaders. Luckily there was no turbulence and the line handlers let out the ropes evenly.
Once the water was down and the gates opened, the yacht behind us very kindly remained tied on until we had safely manoeuvred away from the wall and turned around in the lock, and were on our way out through the gates.
It was quite an eventful way to enter the Pacific Ocean!
We motored out to Balboa where the launch “Lisa” picked up our adviser, and then we motored to Balboa Yacht Club where we offloaded our linehandlers, tyres and ropes. Then we motored on to the Flamenco Island anchorage where we finally stopped.