A singular day   Saturday, 06/05/2023

What an extraordinary day! Never had I ever thought that I would be captaining a boat transiting the Panama Canal. I am delighted to report that it all went very well yesterday – apart from nothing  damaged, we made good time. I must admit that by the end of it all I felt thoroughly exhausted – awake well before 4am, leaving the marina at 4:30am and then being absolutely “on duty” until we docked in La Playita Marina, on the Pacific Ocean, at 4:25pm.

It was a very successful day – but an expensive one: all told the cost of transiting the canal was $4,000. (It’s a pretty perfect monopoly after all: your only other options are to sail around South America by way of Cape Horn – over 10,000 nautical miles – or try to sail north of Canada, for which having an ice breaker would be useful).

I was very fortunate having the four line handlers that I had paid for. They were professionals – no need to instruct them, they knew what they needed to do and did it promptly and more than competently. The pilot advisor frankly didn’t really add much. In practice when going through the locks, the key person was the advisor on the middle boat (the longest, 53 feet or so). Given that my advisor was simply relaying what that advisor was ordering, I was soon simply communicating directly with this guy – not difficult, given that he was only 10 or 12 feet away from me, and very obviously knew exactly what he was doing.

The youngest of my line handlers, a chap in his late twenties, was clearly keen to steer the boat, so when I made lunch for everybody just before noon I handed the wheel to him. The rest of the afternoon I made him first mate, just supervising and taking the helm when we entered locks and finally coming into the marina. This was a novel experience, having an assistant – he clearly enjoyed it greatly, while it took some of the strain off me. Having been at the wheel for over seven hours through the morning, it had got pretty tiring (no surprise that ships typically have four hour watches of duty).

As a simple summary: we left the marina at 04:30 with the four line handlers on board (they slept on the boat). We were supposed to be picking up the pilot advisor at 05:00, but predictably he was late, and then had great difficulty boarding. There was a 14-knot wind blowing across Limón Bay and – in my humble opinion – the captain of the pilot boat was being too cautious: he should have simply come side-on to me (I had two large ball-shaped fenders that would have prevented any damage). For some reason he wouldn’t do that – he was trying to get his bow close enough to allow the advisor to transfer, and it didn’t work. Once we had the advisor on board, we motored the good six miles to the entrance of the first lock. There we rafted up with the two other yachts. Manuka was the starboard boat. Into the lock, passing lines to the handlers ashore so that we were secured in a centre position (important to be secure because the water rushes in creating all sorts of eddies and whirlpools). In at 06:55, we stayed rafted through the three up-locks and were out by 08:35. There was then the relatively long trip across Gatun Lake and along to the first of the downlocks – a good 4 hours of motoring at an average speed of about 6.5 knots. We were in the first lock at 13:15 and out of the third one 2 hours later – it took time, mainly due to the size of the bulk carrier that accompanied us and had to be eased in slowly behind us (the Monrovia-registered Rosalia is 180 metres long and 32 metres wide – and the locks are only 33 metres wide). It was then another hour to motor past Panama City, dropping the advisor (this time very easily) and then heading into La Playita Marina, which is at the end of the long spit of land that stretches out to sea from Panama City.

So that’s the bald account of it. In reality, it feels like I’ve made a huge change. I’ve swapped the Atlantic (of which the Caribbean is a suboceanic part) for the Pacific. It’s very much as if I’ve swapped the Western for the Eastern world – not quite accurate, but close. The big challenge now is the sail to the Marquesas, the first group of islands of French Polynesia – about 4,000 nautical miles distant (4,600 land miles, 7,360 kilometres). This voyage will really bring about the transformation – we will arrive in one of the remotest parts of planet earth, a scattered archipelago that is in the middle of nowhere.