Harmonie - Panama Canal Success!

Panama Canal Success!

Harmonie

Don and Anne Myers

Tue 5 Feb 2008 19:30

08:54.785N 79:31.288W

I apologize for the length of this entry! A better writer could probably tell this story with fewer words...I couldn't figure out how.

We arrived on the Pacific side of Panama Saturday afternoon (2/2) after a two day excursion through the canal. We got the word late last Thursday evening (during the champagne party on BlueFlyer) that we, along with BlueFlyer (Ireland), Storyteller (Australia), Whitbread (UK) and Southern Princess (Australia) were going to transit the canal starting Friday evening, and finishing Saturday afternoon.

My brother Bill arrived without a hitch at around 2am on Thursday night (the taxi driver escorted him right to our boat) and after a quick night's sleep, we scrambled around a bit on Friday to get ready for our planned departure from the dock at 4:30pm. Crew from several other World ARC boats had expressed interest in transiting the canal with us to gain experience for their own transit, so we took them up on it and 'hired' two men (Hilton and Michael) from Lady Kay (UK) to act as line handlers. Next we needed six plastic covered tires to act as fenders and four 125 foot, one inch diameter mega lines to use in the locks. We were able to rent the tires easily enough through the Panama agent the rally is working with, and knew that the four mega lines would also come from this agent. Unfortunately, the lines our group of five boats needed were still in use by the group of rally boats that were finishing up their own canal transit. We're still not sure why there seemed to be such a shortage of lines, but an elaborate plan was concocted to obtain the lines from the boats finishing the canal and get them to our five boats before we entered the first lock. The plan went something like this:

Match Ship (the Panama agent) would hire a small launch (motor boat) on the Pacific side of the canal, catch up to the seven rally boats just after they exited the last lock and collect the four mega lines from each boat on the run. The Match Ship hired launch would then zip to shore, transfer the lines to a Match Ship van and drive the lines back to Colon on the Atlantic side of the canal (a two hour drive). Once there, they would hire another launch, transfer the lines from the van to the launch and motor out to our group of five boats which by that time would be anchored in an area called 'The Flats' waiting for both our lines and our canal advisors to board.

So, we five boats left the dock in Shelter Bay at 4:30pm as planned and motored the short distance to The Flats. There, we all anchored and proceeded to wait for both our lines and our advisors. Time ticked by...5:30....6:30...Michael, one of our 'hired hands' from Lady Kay, suggested that it might be a good time for some tea. In England, when waiting around for something to happen, tea is often the diversion everyone turns to. Being the crass and uncivilized American boat that we are, we had no tea to offer, much to the disappointment of our English friends. Instead we opted for dinner. As we were eating, we saw a pilot boat approach Whitbread, the largest of our fleet of five boats. A pilot boarded Whitbread (a pilot was required as opposed to an advisor because Whitbread is over 65 feet in length). Shortly thereafter, Whitbread pulled up their anchor and started heading for the first lock, which was a mile or two away. We watched all of this and were all thinking the same thing.....'They don't have their lines! How are they going to manage the lock without lines??'. Suddenly we see a little, beat up boat speeding as fast as it could possibly go, trying to catch up with Whitbread. The boat did finally catch Whitbread and toss over the giant lines (not an easy feat as each bundle of rope probably weighed close to 40 pounds and was extremely bulky). After Whitbread received her lines, the launch made its way around to the remaining four of us and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief as we hauled the lines aboard.

Shortly thereafter, the pilot boat approached each of the four boats and dropped off our respective advisors. By this time, it was dark and windy at 20 knots. The pilot boats are quite large and rightfully so as they are usually dropping pilots off on the big ships, not tiny sailboats like ours. So there we sat as the pilot boat loomed closer, and closer. We could see the shadow of our advisor (not a small man) perched on the bow of the pilot boat, waiting for just the right moment to jump aboard our boat. The bow of the pilot boat was about even with the deck of our boat, but our sturdy stainless steel tube lifelines were a barrier that the advisor had to gracefully hop over. In the space of a few seconds, the pilot boat got its bow close enough to our boat such that the advisor could hop over, clearing our life lines in the process. As soon as the advisor's feet left the bow of the pilot boat, the pilot boat backed up fiercely and went on its way to the next sailboat to drop off another advisor. The whole episode was incredibly impressive. The pilot boat never touched or even brushed our boat, regardless of the darkness, wind and wave chop that existed at the time. These guys obviously know their stuff.

Jose, our advisor, immediately put us at ease by asking, 'So, how nervous are you about going through the canal?'. When we all looked at him with white faces (some more than others...Don and I would fall into that category), he laughed and said, 'Let me give you the speech I give to all the small boats I advise through the canal.....All the horror stories about smashed boats and terrible problems, are just that, stories. If we take everything slow and carefully, we will be just fine and at the end you will wonder why you were ever so nervous." This was the point at which our adoration of Jose started (at least for me). He next launched into his 'fender speech' (where to put them, how high off the water, etc.) and then asked us to pull up our anchor and get under way.

As my brother Bill discovered, transiting the Panama Canal is an exercise in patience, a trait he is not necessarily known for (but managed to survive the trip quite well despite this). As described above, our first wait was in 'The Flats' as we waited for our lines and our advisor. Once we got underway, we had to wait another 1-2 hours before the first lock was ready for us. We spent this wait motoring slowly back and forth in the channel, in the dark, dodging the other boats that were doing the same thing, while Jose talked and we listened. Finally, at around 9pm, the signal was given - the lock was almost ready for us. The next step was for us to 'raft up' with two other sailboats before entering the lock. Because the locks are so wide and because the walls of the locks are so rough, small boats like ours do not go into the locks alone and tie up to the wall (like we did in both the Erie Canal and the St. Lawrence river locks). Instead, small boats tie up side-by-side before entering the lock so that they are two or three abreast, then the center boat uses its engine to motor the 'raft' of boats into the center of the lock. So, Southern Princess, which is a 57 foot boat, was the center boat of our 3-boat raft for all six locks. Storyteller, another 57 foot boat rafted to the starboard side of Southern Princess, and we rafted to the port side. Southern Princess is not only larger than Harmonie, but also has a more powerful engine, so she (and her captain John) maneuvered our raft of three boats into and out of all the locks. As you can imagine, this situation was a little uncomfortable for Don, who likes to be the one in control at all times. Like Bill and his patience issue, Don was also very well behaved even when not in control.

After we three boats got assembled into our raft, Southern Princess guided us into the first lock chamber. We were the third set of rafted boats to enter the chamber (for a total of 8 or 9 boats) each raft was situated in the center of the lock with at least 25-30 feet between the lock walls and the boats on either side of each raft. The way in which the rafted boats were held in place was something. When we entered the lock, two line handlers on land heaved a line with a 'monkey fist' (a ball with a lead weight in it) on the end to each of our line handlers, Michael on the bow and Hilton on the stern. The same thing was done for Storyteller on the other side of our raft. When the lines with the monkey fists came hurling through the air at us, we all ducked and didn't make a good catch (it's hard to be coordinated when you've got a lead ball coming at you in the semi-darkness). We quickly snatched up the heaving lines from the deck and Michael and Hilton each tied the end of a mega line to it and the line handlers on land pulled the heaving lines back and secured our mega lines to giant bollards [non-boater translation: like a cleat on a dock, only really big and bulbous shaped] near the lock edge. Once this was accomplished, the four line handlers on each corner of our 3-boat raft ensured that the lines were taut as the lock filled and the boat rose. Picture 1 was taken during our first lock experience. Southern Princess is the boat shown in the foreground, with Storyteller in the background.

We stayed rafted with Southern Princess and Storyteller through the three 'up' locks we transited on Friday night. Once through the third lock, we disengaged ourselves (not easy in the pitch black) and motored a short distance to the anchorage area in Gatun Lake, which is the man made lake that sits at the highest elevation and feeds the 'up' locks on the Atlantic side and the 'down' locks on the Pacific side. By this time it was 12:30am. Jose ate some leftover dinner while he waited for the pilot boat to pick him up and the rest of us 'decompressed' - too wound up to sleep. The pilot boat came, and it and Jose performed the same amazing feat in reverse - the big boat hovering just close enough for Jose to leap aboard and the boat backing off so fast that it never touched us. I applauded, but I'm not sure the pilot boat guys appreciated my appreciation. After that (1:30am) we all fell into bed (Hilton and Michael included - but not all in the same bed) knowing that we had to be ready for our new advisor to arrive between 6 and 6:30am the next morning.

We were all up by six the next morning - partly due to the alarm clock we have in our cabin and partly due to the howling monkeys that were yelling at each other in the jungle beside the lake. Seriously. They were howling. Really, really loud. At first it sounded like some freaky dogs barking and when everyone told me it was howling monkeys, I honestly thought they were kidding. I hadn't heard Jose talk about them the night before. But apparently that's exactly what they were, howling monkeys. The yelling started at one end of the wooded area and made its way to the other. Perhaps this was the monkeys' way of saying good morning to each other (and to us)?

Our new advisor, Adrian, arrived in the same flamboyant fashion on the pilot boat at around 6:30am. We had breakfast, pulled up the anchor and motored through the 'Banana Cut' in Gatun Lake, which to us seemed like the Thousand Islands, but with palm trees instead of evergreens (picture 2). After a very pleasant motor through the lake, we entered the narrowest part of the canal, the Gaillard Cut. Here, dredging is a constant process as they slowly widen this section of the canal and attempt to keep the depth between 50-75 feet. We passed a massive dredging operation (picture 3), where the mud and silt was being pumped from the bottom, through a giant pipeline to a location almost a mile away on shore, where it was dumped. We also passed under the new Panamerican Highway bridge that crosses the canal before the 'down' locks to the Pacific (picture 4). Note the giant cargo ship headed right for us. The canal seemed to get narrower each time we encountered a ship going the opposite way.

We arrived at the first of the three 'down' locks at around 11:15am and proceeded to raft up with our mother ship Southern Princess and Storyteller. We entered the lock and waited there for about an hour (another exercise in patience). Whitbread's pilot boarded very late back in Gatun Lake, which caused all of us to wait for them to catch up. Once Whitbread showed up, the lock procedure started and we made it through the three down locks with no trouble at all. My brother Bill and Michael, our bow line handlers, are shown in picture 5, with the raft of boats ahead of us shown in the background. Picture 6 shows Southern Princess beside us with another raft of boats behind.

Shortly after we exited the last lock, when we were enjoying our first taste of Pacific Ocean air (it does seem different than the Atlantic by they way, not sure why, but it does), we noticed a small, beat-up motor boat speeding across the water coming toward us. We were concerned for a moment before we realized it was the people from Match Ship, come to collect our mega lines for the next group of rally boats to use. They pulled along side us and as we continued forward at a good pace, Hilton heaved the giant bundles of mega lines (we had four even though we only used two) into the Match Ship boat. We threw in the six fender tires for good measure, and Match Ship left us to go collect from the next boat. At this point, it was close to 3pm so we wondered whether the next group of boats would get their lines before or after they left The Flats for the first lock. Hmmmm.

The rest of the trip was easy as we motored a little further into the Pacific and rounded Flamenco Island to find Flamenco Marina where we are now docked. We arrived at about 3:30pm and Match Ship whisked our marvelous line handlers, Michael and Hilton, away and back to Shelter Bay where their wives and boat were waiting to do their own canal transit. The three of us celebrated our successful travels with dinner out at Bennigans, yup, the US chain - how sad that we came all the way to the Pacific side of Panama only to eat at a chain restaurant. Needless to say we all slept very well that night - starting early at about eight o'clock.

So that's our Panama Canal story. The boat did not get damaged (nor did anyone else's), nothing awful happened, both of our advisors were excellent, we had lots of good help between Bill, Michael and Hilton, and the only disturbing thing that occurred was waking up to howling monkeys (which was maybe more intriguing than disturbing). If you were to ask Don a week ago what he was most concerned about, he would have told you that going through the Panama Canal concerned him far more than any other part of our planned voyage. Now that we have the relatively painless transit behind us, I wonder if the rest of our trip will really be easier? Let's hope so.

Anne