The Pacific Ocean beckons

Serendipity
David Caukill
Thu 2 Feb 2012 13:20

Thursday 2nd February 2012  Isla Taboga  8 48.6N 79 30.6W  

Today’s Blog by David

 

The Panama Canal Transit completed as advertised on January 26/27th.  After waiting for ages for “our turn” as other freighters were prioritised ahead of us, a group of 11 yachts began our transit, rafted in groups  of three across (well ok, one was a group of two!)

 

                                           

 

 

Each boat has to have an “Adviser”. These guys are simply Canal employees and may never have skippered a boat in earnest – so they are not seamen – and can tell you to do silly things.   The key is to get agreement that the Adviser on the central yacht calls the shots.  If you don’t then they act independently and can cause havoc in the locks (say the outside boat decides we are going too fast and goes hard astern twisting the raft through 90 degrees……).

 

Having got through the first three locks, we anchored at about 01.15 hrs to stay  overnight close by the construction work for the new canal locks.  Because Panama wants to have this finished in time for the Centenary  of its opening, they are working  19 hours a day … and so it was that we settled down to a cacophony  of heavy plant moving around very quickly until - at 02.00 - the music stopped.  Up early with the sparrows we motored the 28 or so miles to the next lock in the early morning sun.

 

                                              

 

Our descent through Miraflores Locks was available on the Web Cam (for those of you with the patience to wait for us!) while Bob continued to do what Bob does best:

 

                                             

 

Eventually, at about 15.30 llocal time , 24 hours after we slipped our moorings at Shelter Bay, we arrived  at Panama City.

 

                                           

 

 

Oyster had resolved to replace our battery bank and had sent  Gavin(3) to deal with it (3) because this is the third person called Gavin who they have had work on the boat since it was built!). Now, when I specified the boat, I decided to go for simple technology batteries – tried and understood  – i.e. wet cells -  using a globally available golf cart battery (sic) made by Varta. The idea was that if a battery failed they would be easily replaceable – assuming of course that Varta did not discontinue making them almost as soon as they shipped them to the Yard!   Saturday was spent trying to track down 12 new batteries (which should have been delivered to the marina the day before) while Gavin fixed our HF Radio (the ‘SSB’),  The problem was that no two batteries are the same size and so  Gavin (3) had to work three long days to swap out the batteries, connect them up and secure them.

 

We then spent an uncomfortable night in a rolly anchorage waiting for other repairs to be completed but too late for us to get to where we wanted to go so we sailed 8 miles to Isla Taboga where we passed a comfortable might. 

 

Now breakfasted – we are about to up anchor and sail to Islas Perlas a supposedly idyllic group of islands about 35 miles away.