Waiting for the canal…. Friday, 28/04/2023
Sailed down here to Shelter Bay on Monday. Took under 5 hours, without incident. Well, maybe not quite… last Saturday afternoon I thought I’d just turn on the engine to check everything was ok. And the starter battery was flat – very clearly in the process of dying. So before I left on Monday morning I had to borrow a battery charger from the marina and charge the battery a bit in order to start the engine. There’s always something…
The battery behaved as expected: while the engine was on it was showing a charge of over 14 volts, but once the engine was turned off that declined rapidly. So a new battery is clearly needed. Which has not been straightforward. There is a small chandlery here in Shelter Bay Marina, but strangely they do not stock a few batteries, but order them in. And their supplier has turned around and said he has no stock. They offered me a deep cycle AGM battery, but that’s no good as a starter battery, it’s really for storing solar power or being charged to run a small electric engine. I’ve discovered a battery shop in the shopping centre in Colon and will see what I can get there tomorrow.
It’s very scenic around the marina, which is basically on the edge of a national park which stretches westwards along the coast. Very close is an old lighthouse, the Faro de Punta Toro. It was built in the early 1890’s and it is thought very possible that it was designed by Gustave Eiffel, of Eiffel Tower fame, who was contracted to work out here in the mid-1880s for the French company that made an ill-fated first attempt to build a canal (the Americans finally succeeding more than 20 years later).
Apart from the natural environment, the marina has a nice swimming pool, which is great at the end of the day as it descends into shade – even if the water is a bit too warm thanks to the strong sunshine on it during the day.
On Tuesday morning, the Admeasurer came to visit to formally measure the boat. She was a young woman, great lively personality and excellent English, so it was a pleasure dealing with her. On Wednesday morning my canal transit was confirmed for Friday 2nd May – in fact I could have opted for a slot on Tuesday 2nd, but wanted enough time to sort everything out nicely. So the wait to transit the canal is now down to about 7-10 days – much improved to what it was in March and early April – if I recall correctly, my friends on Skyfall had a 21-day wait.
It will be good to get through and out into the Pacific – a big event, swapping the Caribbean for the mighty Pacific Ocean! I will probably need to wait a few days for suitable wind before leaving Panama – at present conditions are very calm, too calm to make decent progress down to the Galapagos. Hopefully that will change.
Well, at the end of next week I should be able to report on the canal transit. Until then….
