Curacao Panama City Part 2

girls ashore to buy molas

We snorkeled, walked the beach, had BBQ’s, did washing in a well on a small island and generally unwound after the hustle and bustle of Curacao and Cartagena.

music evening on Reach

Chichime


Bill

We then moved of down the coast of Panama, stopping briefly in Portobello, a fortified town founded during the time that the Spanish god ships were assembling on that coast. From there we headed down to Colon, which is on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal.

Since this was our second time with our own boat doing the canal transit, we expected it to be a lot more enjoyable and it certainly was!

Galena on her way to the first lock

Our good friends Gil and Lexi, who have a sister ship called Sunday, came through from Panama city together with Buzz and Maureen of Encore to be our line handlers.

Gil and Lexi


Buzz and Maureen

Gil and Lexi we met in San Diego and we sailed down to La Paz with them; Buzz and Maureen were friends who Jeff had first met in American Samoa in 1978!

Such a wonderful thing to see them all again!

In the anchorage waiting the day of our transit we met and helped to organize some other boats and one called Detour with an Argentinian skipper, Hernan, went through the locks tied to us, while our friend Bill on Galena was tied on our other side. Each of these boats had 4 line handlers who had their own boats waiting to get through and gain experience before their own transits.

Our advisor

Hernan



Bill

Jeff

Bill had 2 French skippers and some mutual friends of ours from Hakuna Matata, a Singapore couple Yi Lin and Vincent, whom we first met in Cartagena.

Bill with Yi lin and Vincent

In the first lock


The men who throw you the lines

All in all there were 6 people on our boat, 10 from the other 2 boats and after passing through the first set of locks in the late afternoon of Wednesday the 1^st of June, all three vessels were tied up overnight to a large floating buoy in the Gatun Lake.

locks closing

our position in the lock

The 16 people gravitated to our deck where a great party ensued and too much alcohol was consumed and nobody went to bed till about 02.00!

left overs after the party

The next morning at 05.45 the 3 advisors (pilots) from the Panama Canal Company came on board and we all set of on the 40 mile trip through the lake.

daybreak in the Gatun Lake

5 minutes later our engine overheated and we then spend an hour or so finding and fixing the problem.

Our advisor was extremely sympathetic and allowed us to continue once the problem was sorted and he did not report the incident to the canal authorities which might well have cost us a great deal of money. They fine yachts heavily for holding up canal business.

two captains



still a bit apprehensive



traffic



a big dredge in the canal



a Dutch boat going the other way

Somehow we all ended up at the next set of locks at about the same time and we had an uneventful decent to the Pacific through the Pedro Miquel and Miraflores locks.

In the Pacific

A quick stop was made at the Balboa Yachtclub to leave Buzz and Maureen at their boat and to drop of our 12 motor tires and 4 special long lines. The tires are mandatory fenders that all yachts must use during transits and the 4 control lines that almost no yachts have their own on board.

So the lines and tires are constantly shuttled from one end of the canal to the other as each small boat transits to or from the Pacific.

A couple of agents arrange paperwork for the transits and make quite a good business renting out these tires and lines.

From the yacht club the last of our energies were used to motor through rough seas to the Las Brisas anchorage.

The rain started as we left Balboa and was quite torrential.

An hour later in the anchorage Jose was putting down our anchor wearing only her swimsuit! The rain continued to fall so heavily that she was almost invisible from the cockpit!

We set the anchor and waited for the rain to stop enough so we could put the dinghy down and take Gil and Lexi back to their own boat.

This was the end of an exhausting day and we happily fell into bed.

The moral of this story should be don’t party till 02.30 in the morning in the Gatun Lake!!!

For the next few days we were visited by our friends Chuck and Sharon who have recently build a lovely home near El Volcan in central Panama. They took us all over the place with Chuck giving running commentaries on the country side and its history. Chuck had been a Canal Zone police man as a young man, is a Panamanian citizen and knows the country intimately.

Chuck and Sharon

The locks seen from the top

A friends boat with Bill as line handler

They took us the the Miraflores Canal museum and described in detail their many voyages together on the ship Ancon, which was the first ship to pass through the canal. It took Panamanian residents up to New Orleans every year or two to give them a break from the tropical heat.

We also went up to the Gamboa resort next to the canal, overlooking part of the Smithsonian nature reserve…….. Absolutely beautiful!

They came by again the following morning with a car load of fruit and vegetables for us before returning home.

Since then we have busied ourselves with preparations for our 4000 miles trip to the Marquesas Islands!

Galena at anchor in Las Brisas



Thunderstorm over Panama City

Pelican on our bow, lovely, but very messy!

Columbus, our other friends we met in Cartagena

We know that the first part of this trip will be made frustrating as we shall be in the influence of the doldrums where there is little wind and lots of squalls.

Once in the South East trades things should get better.

Our estimated time for this trip is 4 to 5 weeks at sea.

The next entry therefore will be from the Marquesas!