Panama Canal Transit

Finally, several small mountains of paperwork behind us, we set off for our much-anticipated transit of the Panama Canal. The protocol is pretty simple for pleasure boats. We muster in an anchorage called "the flats" just outside the Atlantic entrance to the canal to await an advisor, who is an official representative of the Canal and who joins us for the transit. From there it's a 2-day event: passing through the Gatun locks on the first evening and into Lake Gatun; then a 27-mile motor across the lake on day 2 to exit through the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks into the Pacific.

Three locks up, three locks down. No worries, as long as you don't mind being cheek to jowl with enormous freighters and steering through some tight spaces. Luckily, Lani was our skipper and we had four line handlers on board. So, my job was just to drink beer and eat popcorn.

Lani at the helm in the first lock

Our overly cautious agent advised us to anchor on the flats at 1 pm, even though our transit time wasn't until 5 pm. We did as we were told; but our advisor didn't even show until 8:30. We entered the first lock at 10 pm.

There are two options for transiting the locks. One is to create a raft with 1 or 2 other yachts, and then tie the four corners of the raft up to the walls with massive ropes, keeping the raft in the center of the lock. This is what we did when we crewed on Remi De, a friend's boat, a week prior in order to gain experience. It's a bit tricky to keep the raft together.

Option 2 is to tie up to a larger boat, like a ferry, which itself just snugs alongside one side of the lock. This is a far easier option. Lucky for us, this is how it played out on day one when a 100-year-old wooden tour boat called the Islamorada that was supposedly once owned by Al Capone and Andrew Carnegie (not at the same time) entered the locks. They pulled up to the side, our friends on Tehani-Li, a fifty-foot monohull, pulled alongside, and we tied up to Tehani Li.

Doors closing in the second lock

View from the second Gatun lock, showing how these form "steps" up into Lake Gatun

We finally exited out of the third lock into Lake Gatun at close to midnight. We tied up to a mooring near the locks and collapsed into bed. 5 hrs later, a rapping on the hull and our advisor for the second day, Ivan, came aboard. Get rolling, he said. We had an early exit on the other side.

Lake Gatun sits much higher than the Atlantic or Pacific, requiring a series of locks to step up and down on the transit.

Our motor through the lake was relatively uneventful—hot and lazy, with one crocodile spotted and numerous huge ships passing by. The passage is 27 nautical miles, about half of which is in the lake and half is in a narrow canal cut over a hundred years ago through the mountains that sit in the middle of the Isthmus.

The Canal is a constant work in process. Here's some dredging work, and a huge ship.

To transit the canal you have to have four adults on board, plus a fifth designated as skipper. Lani, who normally steers when we anchor or come into a dock, took the helm for the entire transit. We were nervous that the male advisors wouldn't take her seriously, but we lucked out with two great advisors who were very supportive, smart, and capable.

We were also lucky that one of our line handlers was Bruce Neville from Remi De, who brought along his daughter Remi. The girls broke up the monotony of it all with a marionette show on the deck in the middle of the Pedro Miguel lock.

This is a good description of the kind of activity we encountered throughout the canal. This is just before the last two locks, called the Miraflores locks. We had to drift close to the edge of the canal while this large freighter came out with tugs and sidled up to a fueling station. Then, we slipped into the lock behind it.

Nervewracking at first, you eventually get accustomed to it.

The last lock is the most dangerous, as a pretty serious current is always whipping out of it into the Pacific. Here, Lani had to put on display her awesome prowess at the helm, gunning Dafne out into the Pacific and into the next stage of our adventures. Well done.