It wasn't quite four a.m. when Neal motored up in Namirda's dinghy to pick us up. Between our anticipation of the early wake-up call, and the bouncy anchorage, we hadn't slept very well. Nor had Neal and Greta, nor Bob and Sue from the boat Carefree, Namirda's other line handlers for the day. The six of us huddled in the cockpit in the cool darkness, gulping down coffee and tea, waiting for the pilot boat to bring us our transit advisor. Namirda had been told to be ready at 4:30, but nobody was surprised that the pilot boat didn't come by until 5:30. (Any complaints died on our lips when we learned that our advisor had to leave his house in Panama City at 2:30!)
Listening
to the yachtie grapevine and reading magazine articles, most cruisers
regard the Panama Canal transit with some trepidation. The "advisors"
for small boats, training to be big-boat pilots, are ignorant of the
limitations and abilities of sailboats, arrogant and autocratic -- or
so we are all led to believe. Either we lucked out, or things have
changed. Guido, a Panamanian despite his Italian name, was an
easygoing, pleasant fellow in his early thirties, and the first thing
he said to us in his excellent but heavily accented English
was: "Relax. This is easy. Everyone is going to have a
good time." It turned out that his usual job is tugboat master, but
he works as a transit advisor for yachts during the high season of
February through April.
As we lifted anchor and motored toward the channel, we could see the other two sailboats we'd be transiting with doing likewise. Polly was a small but sleek Australian boat, bright red, with a crusty singlehander who'd been cruising for something on the order of thirty years. He had apparently hired a crew of local "professional line handlers". Another Bold Venture was British-flagged like Namirda, a married couple assisted by other cruisers. All three boats were festooned with the plastic-wrapped old tires that are de rigueur for canal fenders. Apparently it's a bit of a racket; they are for sale for $3 each in Colón, and the yacht club at Balboa, on the Pacific side, asks $1 each to "dispose" of them, i.e. send them back to the guy in Colón. But if you give them to one of your line handlers to take back and use for his transit the next day, the cabbie will charge $3 each to take them in the cab! Ideally cruisers could just give them to someone transiting in the opposite direction, who would then give them to someone transiting in the original direction...but there are far more Atlantic-to-Pacific yacht transits than vice-versa, so it doesn't work out.
This
is probably the place to point out that an Atlantic-to-Pacific
transit of the Big Ditch is not, as you might intuitively think, east
to west. In fact, Colón is west of Balboa. It is odd to
think that we would go eastward from the Atlantic to the
Pacific! But in the vicinity of the canal, the Caribbean coast is to
the north and the Pacific coast to the south, and the canal runs more
or less southeast from Colón.
The main business of the canal, of course, is shipping, and yachts are just an afterthought, squeezed into the space left over by a ship that isn't a "Panamax" -- the maximum size allowed in the canal, a staggering 965 feet long by 106 wide. A Panamax ship centered in a lock chamber has a clearance of less than 18 feet ahead and behind, and only two feet on each side! The day before our transit, we and the Namirdas had taken a taxi to the observation deck at the Gatún locks, and we watched a few of these monsters lock through. We were really there to watch the yachts that came through on the next lockage, just to help us get an idea of what was going to happen.
As we approached the locks behind the Cunard cruise ship Caronia, Guido explained the procedure. The three sailboats would raft together as we slowly motored toward the first lock. At 51 feet overall, Namirda was the largest boat and so would be in the middle, and although each boat had an advisor on board, Guido would be in charge overall. We tossed double bow and stern lines to the other boats, and they threw spring lines over to us. Soon we were transformed into a three-engined trimaran. Guido checked out the cleats and chocks on the other boats; if he didn't think they could hold the raft, we would have to run the locking lines through Namirda's cleats, but he decided that the others had adequate equipment -- which meant that they had to do all the work.
So all we had to do was watch. The lock gates swung closed. The Caronia was fastened to cables running to small locomotives which would pull her through the locks, and then it was our turn. Men on the lock walls tossed messenger lines with weighted ends down to Polly and Another Bold Venture. (Actually, one guy missed the first time, and was obviously ribbed by his co-workers; further on we saw the target for accuracy, and the bar for height, that the lock workers use for practice and contests.) The line handlers tied the heavy dock lines onto the messenger lines, and the lock men hauled them back and looped them to bollards. The line handlers adjusted their lines so that Namirda sat dead center behind the cruise ship, lined up with the Caronia's flagpole. There was a sudden rush of turbulence as the water began to pour into the lock chamber, and the raft of boats twisted this way and that. Venture seemed to get awfully close to the chamber wall -- we thought that one of the "professionals" on Polly wasn't doing a very good job -- but as the chamber continued to fill the turbulence eased, and we all floated gently up to the top.
Gatún is a triple lock, so there were two more chambers to go. The lock workers released the dock lines but kept the messenger lines attached, and walked with the lines up the stairs to the next level. The Caronia politely kept her speed nice and slow, so we didn't get too buffetted by prop wash -- of course, she was mostly pulled along by the locomotives. Guido directed Neal, at the wheel, and the other skippers and advisors, and soon we were in position for the second lift, and after that, the third. Throughout all of this, nobody on Namirda had much to do, other than wave at the tourists on the cruise ship. That was ok. It was relaxing.
We
reached the top of the third lock, 85 feet above sea level. The
Caronia slowly headed out into Lake Gatún, then the
outer boats pulled in their docklines and we motored away from the
lock. As soon as we were clear of the massive gates, Guido directed
us to release the lines holding the other boats, and soon the
temporary trimaran was back to being three individual sailboats.
"Bring it up to full speed," instructed Guido. "And if you can go
faster by putting up a sail as well..." Soon all three yachts were
flying genoas, and with the wind howling behind us, we really
moved.
Guido had us turn into the Banana Cut, a small-boat-only shortcut among hummocky jungle islands and picturesque snags. We watched birds investigate our mast (they seemed particularly interested in Namirda's radar dome mounting) and kept an eye out for monkeys, as Guido told us stories about the canal and about his job as a tug captain and yacht advisor. Every once in a while he'd murmur into the radio mike clipped to his collar. When we rejoined the main channel, he kept us out of the way of the ships, telling us when we had room to scoot around on the wrong side of a channel marker and when we had to just squeeze over. There was heavy traffic -- 35 ships were transiting today, according to Guido -- but the ships all gave us plenty of room (and vice versa!).
Keeping clear of ships was particularly heavy on our minds because of a report we'd heard on the radio nets the morning before. A chemical tanker had hit a bulk grain carrier in Lake Gatún, disabling and nearly sinking it. We saw the bulk carrier, Prairie Sky, still moored in the south end of the lake. It sat bow down, rudder and prop out of the water, with tugboats holding the ship in position, presumably so that the sailboat-sized hole gaping in its port bow stayed high out of the water. Guido didn't know the details of the collision, but he surmised that the tanker had lost steering ability.
By
the time we got to the narrowest part of the canal, the Galliard Cut,
we had pretty much lost the wind, so we put away the sail. We passed
two really big dredgers, working away. The ACP -- the Pananama Canal
Authority, which took over responsibility for the canal from the US
on December 31, 1999 -- is spending $1 billion to modernize equipment
and widen and straighten portions of the canal. At least as far as we
can tell, all the worries about the handover have been groundless.
(That is, as far as daily operations are concerned; the effects on
the economy here have been mixed. Canal workers are well-paid, but
the service jobs which supported the Americans in the Canal Zone are
gone now.) It's a point of national pride. Everyone from the tug
pilots to the lock workers is determined to prove that Panamanians
are just as capable as Americans, and so far they appear to be doing
a good job.
Polly was still close behind -- for a small boat with a loud, smoky engine, they zoomed -- but Venture had dropped back out of sight, and after a quick consultation with his radio, Guido told us we'd be going through the rest of the locks without them. Instead, we'd raft up with Polly and then tie alongside a tugboat against the wall; the tug would handle all the lines, and all of us could sit back and enjoy the ride. But although we had no work to do during the actual lockage, we had a more complicated raft to deal with. First Greta and I moved all the real fenders away from the port side, where the tug would be, and swapped them for more old tires. Because tug bumpers tend to be dirty and greasy,Greta wanted only tires on the tug side. We tied the tires on low, because we were early for the next lockage, and we needed to tie temporarily to the lock wall, which was very low. Shortly after we'd made fast to the wall, Polly came galloping in at about six knots to raft to our starboard side. We all jumped over to the starboard side and fended off like mad as we got all the lines secure. When the tug came around us and got in position at the front of the chamber, we untied from the wall; as Neal drove the raft up to the tug's starboard side, the "fender patrol" moved all the tires so they rested higher on the hull, where we'd be in contact with the tug. Rafting to the tug was complicated by a strong crosswind, but after working the lines we eventually got snuggled up to the tugboat in the proper position.
Then came the ship. While locking up, our raft of sailboats sat behind the ship, but for down-locking the yachts are in the front of the lock. It was a little spooky to see the huge green bulk of the container ship CSCL Genoa creep up behind us like a mobile skyscraper, blotting out the sky. The ship's bow wave pushed at our boats, and we could see the lines strain. We hoped the locomotives pulling the ship had good brakes!
We got through the Pedro Miguel lock without incident, then untied from the tug. Polly dropped our lines, and both boats motored past the Pedro Miguel boat club to the Miraflores double locks which would bring us down to the Pacific. Guido first told us that we'd be alongside a tug on the other side for these locks, so we rushed around swapping the tires on the port side with the fenders on the starboard. We were just about to come up to the lock wall when Guido got word on his radio that no, we'd be on the tug's starboard side again. Off came the tires and fenders again, back over to their original sides. We repeated the drill we'd done at the Pedro Miguel lock, tying to the wall, rafting with Polly, leaving the wall, raising all the tires, and rafting up to the tug. After lugging those heavy tires back and forth all over Namirda, I was getting kind of, um, tired.
But
once we had made fast to the tug, we could relax again and wave at
the webcam (see www.pancanal.com/eng)
as we got lowered another two steps. The tugboat men didn't expend
any more effort than we did; they just wrapped their lines back and
forth around various capstans and rails, and let friction do the
work. When the last locks opened, we untied from the raft and moved
out of the freshwater canal, into the salt water of the Pacific
Ocean. (The Pacific looked an awful lot like the Atlantic. The big
difference was that according to Namirda's water temperature
thermometer, the water is 67°F, which is 20°F cooler than
the Caribbean side -- a little chilly for snorkeling!) We drank
celebratory beers as we motored out under the Bridge of the Americas,
where Neal tossed a Panamanian penny (un
centesimo) overboard, for luck. At just about 4 in the
afternoon -- twelve hours after we'd boarded Namirda in Colon
-- we pulled in to the fuel dock at the Balboa Yacht Club, and Bob,
Sue, Britt, and I disembarked.