Sailing the Panama Canal

Eager to see the Panama Canal up close and travel some way up through Central America by boat, we trawled the internet for spaces on boats looking for crew and spent a day at the port in Panama City accosting boat owners. In the end we were found by Fritz, who had just sailed his 42 foot sail yacht across the Atlantic and was headed down through the canal and up the Pacific coast, eventually to his home of San Francisco, California. We travelled up to the marina near Colon where his yacht was berthed to find Fritz amidst a flurry of boat maintenance and got to know him over several beers. He's a successful 60 year old engineer and bewildered us both with anecdotes about his flux gate and alternator, and though rather brash and clearly a lover of meat, we seemed to get on well enough.

It was going to be a week before we could transit the canal and we spent several days in the marina organising provisions and helping with some repairs as well as taking advantage of the pool, gym and bar facilities where we got to know several other boat owners. The cruiser community really seems very friendly and helpful to one another, always chatting to neighbours on the quay and in the bar and helping with each other's problems. We were even roped into judging a cooking competition! The main thing we learned was that owning a boat was a very good way to spend a lot of time and money fixing things that continuously break. It seemed most people were working on or waiting for repairs and we realised how easy we had it when we had been chartering boats without all this hassle!

We convinced Fritz to spend a few days sailing nearby whilst we were waiting for other crew to arrive for the canal transit, and to prove to him that we had sailed before. It's a good thing that we had, because we were soon dodging approaching supertankers under sail on our way out to visit Portobello and nearby Turtle Bay. Returning to Colon just in time for some vital parts and with the arrival of Jenny, our fourth crew member also from the UK, and Dylan, a Canadian who lived locally and was helping out transiting the Canal, we were set to go.

The canal is said to be mankind's greatest ever achievement of engineering, its 70km length cutting across Panama with three sets of enormous locks to raise and lower enormous supertankers from sea level. However, the most challenging part of its construction was a large section in the south that had to be cut entirely through the land and the construction of this over a hundred years ago resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 labourers, mostly from disease, before health and sanitation were improved enough to allow the work to complete.

Our trip, along with two other sail boats with which we were going to raft through the locks, would take two days and we were joined by an 'advisor' from the canal authority who issued very direct advice to Fritz, who usually had different ideas. For a while at least we got away with sailing downwind just a few metres alongside a supertanker, involving several rather tense gybes. The most exciting part was was within the locks where we would catch and tie on mooring lines then take up or ease as the water level was raised or lowered. Strong currents meant quick rope work was essential and highly excitable advisors would shout contradictory instructions to crew and argue amongst each other whilst tying up. It was during one such flurry that Ali's brand new Ray Ban sunglasses slipped swiftly from his forehead into the swirling abyss, to his misery. However, beer, wine and snacks were enjoyed as we slowly worked our way down the 80m drop to the Pacific ocean. It was late at night when we finally made it through the final set of locks and then moored one night back in Panama City before beginning sailing up the Pacific coast.

We feel we can definitely now tick the canal off the Panama to do list!