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Panama Canal |
December 1, 2000 - Balboa, Panama Hello Everybody, It's morning and we are powering along deep-water channel towards all the stuff that will entail our going through the Panama Canal. We can see dark-green islands with tropical foliage and a whole stack of high-rise buildings on the horizon (more than Acapulco - from a distance these seem to imply business and a big city more than tourism) and ships all around. We'll go through the Canal tomorrow or the next day and we've been reading about it. We'll have more to tell once we've gone through, but here is a passage from a cruising guide that has helped to heighten our anticipation of what is to come: "Transit Equipment & Personnel Go over this checklist and get each item and person completely squared away before you make any moves toward getting a transit date. All this is at the Port Captain's discretion, and he has the final authority about any questionable equipment or personnel you may have. 1. Steady and reliable propulsion: Each vessel must have either an onboard engine capable of pushing your boat at the 5-knot minimum, or you need to hire a canal tug, which is very expensive. 2. Panama Canal lines: You must have four 120-foot lines of a diameter suitable for your vessel. Consider the tremendous shock and strain of your boat being dashed toward a concrete wall during up-locking. (Yachts transiting "center chamber" were having problems with 100-foot lines, so the minimum line length was recently increased to 120 feet.) Poly-line is not acceptable, because it slips too easily. (Tip: It may be possible to rent canal lines form ship's agent Pete Stevens; see below.) Your four 120 foot lines must be all of one piece, that is no joints of two lines. The end of each 120-foot line needs an eye splice with a 3-foot opening in order to fit over the huge bollards. A large bowline is an awkward but acceptable alternative to an eye splice. (Tip: Your cleats must handle the diameter of these lines in a figure eight that won't slip off. Test them ahead of time. Having a line slip could cost you your boat.) 3. Chocks and bitts: Before you can transit, the Panama Canal Commission's Port Captain will require you to sign a waiver releasing the PCC from liability for any damages that may result from your inadequate bitts and chocks. Because of the extremely steep angle of the lines during transit your boat needs to have four closed chocks. And due to the extreme turbulence, it needs four very sturdy bitts. Open chocks are not acceptable, so you may be required to have steel bars welded on top to close them. Flimsy cleats may have to be replaced or have sturdy backing plates through-bolted below decks. 4. Adequate fendering: If your fenders fail during transit, then obviously they were not adequate. Use the absolute biggest, strongest fenders you can find, because they are your best insurance against damage. Yes, do buy special fenders just for your transit. Smaller boats can keep them deflated and stowed until reaching Panama, inflate them and test for leaks before transit, then after transit perhaps sell them to other boaters who arrived unprepared. We've never found adequate fenders sold in Panama stores. 5. Onboard line handlers: Each boat needs four very strong people to serve as its onboard line handlers, one to constantly work each of the four 120-foot Panama Canal lines throughout the entire transit. Everyone handling lines should know exactly what's going on, and be able to keep the boat from smashing into the concrete walls. This in not a place for light-weights. Line handling requires stamina, a strong back, tall stature for leverage, and callused hands (wear sturdy gloves). During up-locking, the turbulence can be so great and the sudden shocks so strong that few women or small men possess the strength and stamina required to keep the lines under control while they are being hauled in. If one line slips, the hull can be thrown against the concrete walls or steel gates. For this reason, pick muscular line handlers. While you are transiting center chamber line handlers cannot set down their lines to take pictures, eat, rest or get out of the sun or rain. It's a job that must be taken very seriously. On larger boats, having an extra body to tail each line handler may be a good idea, but smaller boats get way too crowded for extras." One gets the impression they're not messing around here. Otherwise, our trip from Quepos, Costa Rica to Panama has been pretty benign. We sailed more than we anticipated (we'd gotten so used to powering and sometimes this easterly shot can be beset with winds on the nose), with some nice force three and four breezes behind us to fill the course, raffee and big nylon jib. We reached our most southerly point yesterday evening sometime (something under eight degrees of latitude) then made a leftish turn and headed east with some north in it. The weather has been pleasant in a weird, dramatic way - heavy overcast with some squalls that has kept the sun off of us and Alcyone a little cooler than before. Generally, since we got to Costa Rica the brutally warm days have backed off a bit. Fishing was good - we caught two magnificent mahi mahi within a half hour of each other and are still dining off the proceeds of that haul. One day (the trip from Quepos to here took four days), just as we crossed the border between Costa Rica and Panama the conditions were such that on watch Leslie was spotting sea turtle after sea turtle. Within an hour she'd sighted fifteen, and a couple of sea snakes. The seas were calm, with little ripples and the sun would glint off the wet shells of the turtles. We would power within fifty feet of some of them. They'd lift up their leathery, beaked heads, give us a once over and then get back to swimming. We closed in on the canal place a little early, so we spent the part of last night anchored at a little island about 20 miles out of Balboa. We arrived in late afternoon, the clouds were dark and dramatic and in that light our little island seemed a perfect tropical island, all overgrown with foliage and boobies nesting in the trees by the shoreline. Everyone got in a good swim and Sugar barbecued some of the mahi mahi and we had a wonderful dinner at anchor. The boat has rhythms that change from situation to situation. Underway, meals can be a little hurried with people eating and heading off to stand watch. In port sometimes meals are influenced by the possibility of getting ashore - if you can get the dishes done by 9:00 PM there's still some time left to go exploring. But at an anchorage like last night - calm; at the end of a passage and on the cusp of an adventure - everyone lingers a while in the main saloon enjoying there food and the conversation can get deeper as people trot out memories and thoughts coaxed forth by the comfortable ambiance. This leg of our trip is coming to a close and it is a good time to mention Bill and Harry, who will be taking off in the next couple of days. They shared a cabin and contributed their special stuff to our trip. Bill knows part or all of every song known to man from the 1920's to the 1950's and sings snatches of them either spontaneously or as they relate to the circumstances around him. As our most mature crewmember, he displays an old-style chivalry and pep and a big, practical scientific knowledge from his years as a salesman. He's a canny helmsman (he races a Luders 16 in San Diego). As our most senior member he's had the most right to complain about the brutal natural environment that occasionally challenges us all, and yet he's a lot more stoic about it than Jeffrey. And if he calls Bridget a sweet young thing one more time she's going to deck him. Harry is a recently retired San Francisco cop who is like the kid at camp who REALLY likes camp. He loves everything about the boat and throws himself into it with a steady, good-natured enthusiasm. He has learned to climb the rigging, to check the accuracy of our GPS with his sun shots, he sets and puts away the anchor light, he is starting to learn to play the recorder (Darby tried to teach him, but had to give up. It was too hard) and he just about OWNS this boat with his curiosity and interest. He can wiggle his ears independent of any other facial motion (apparently he used to do this professionally during domestic disputes for distressed children. Whenever you tell Harry something that he judges to be too serious, his ears start wiggling) and tells terrible jokes in such a generous manner that you have to smile. Bill tells some groaners, too; they both have contributed significantly to the flavor of this passage. Other notes, as we hang out here waiting for the customs officials to arrive. Under Chris' tutelage, Alyce is really making progress on the flute. She and Chris practice a duet of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" that is a pleasure to listen to. It's the sort of thing that, by proving to herself that she can master something more sophisticated than nursery rhymes, moves Alyce into the ranks of real musicians. Darby, too, is progressing musically. Chris has got her to acknowledge that making music is more than just a matter of will. On the recorder she now pays attention to such matters as fingering and reading notes (both timing and pitch). Chris has announced there will be a Christmas concert for the holidays. Schoolwork in general is going well, too. Underway Alyce has about four hours of studies a day and Darby has two hours. Bridget runs them through all sorts of subjects, creatively presented. Alyce's reading and math and writing are all progressing. Underway, after dinner, when the boat has dimmed down for a night of watch-standing, Alyce, Leslie and Bridget can sometimes be found off in a corner with a flashlight playing Scrabble. Also, "The Sound of Music" has taken its place onboard as a hauling chantey. Alcyone has three DVD's on board of musical comedies - "The Sound of Music," "Annie" and "The Little Mermaid, II." Darby has committed every song to memory and rehearses them (lives them?) for what seems to be hours on end. She really loves to sing, takes it seriously (with the same gravity as, for instance, the rules of being a princess) and never seems to tire of it. (Sugar has just shortened Alcyone's overall length to under 80' by disconnecting the main gooseneck and moving the main boom inboard two feet. You get a discount for being less than 80 feet overall. Now Chris is trying to cockbill the yard - sideways and up and down -- so it takes up no more width than the beam of the boat.) More later... We're sailing away from Panama, sails set a little close-hauled with low engine RPM to keep us moving through a bit of a lumpy sea. The saltine crackers are out and they taste real good right now, but spirits are up because the wind is coming from a funny direction and the seas should become more regular as we get away from land. And, oh yes, . . . we're in the Atlantic Ocean!!!! Our transit of the Panama Canal was exciting enough (one can see how it could easily become more exciting) -- an experience full of all sorts of memorable stuff. First of all, we got lucky and it was not as challenging for us as the cruising guide implied. You can see, though, how the Canal can be hell on yachts. It is built for big ships and the transiting of little sailboats is an afterthought. This is how it works: A lock is 110 feet wide and 1,000 feet long. The regular commercial traffic fits snug in the lock with maybe a couple of feet or yards to spare on either side. The ships are secured to the sides of the locks by cables that are controlled by big winches mounted on little railway cars that run the ships along the lock. Compare that with the conditions a smaller boat finds. For a boat Alcyone's size, a lock seems like a big swimming pool with towering sides that somebody drained most of the water out of. You handle your own lines -- two on the bow, two on the stern, if you are going what they call "center chamber" -- which are connected to bollards a great height above you before the water starts flowing in from the bottom. A little inattention to your lines as the water is rising and it would be easy for a smaller boat to get sideways in the lock and end up bouncing and scraping along the sides of the lock. Topsides could get scratched, rigging could get torqued, boat appendages could get snapped off. It is just such a massive, powerful, oversized environment that nothing around there is going to touch you very gently. Our own experience began around 5:30 AM when our pilot, Alberto, came on board. Oh, no it didn't. There's all the Panama City stuff first to report on. Rewind from Sunday (the day we transited) to Friday morning, when we first arrived and tied to a mooring in front of the Balboa Yacht Club. The Balboa Yacht Club proper has actually burned to the ground, although there remains a pool that Darby and Alyce put to good use and a bar appended to the pool. The whole "complex" is on the grounds of a former US military base. Since the Canal was handed over to Panama on December 31, 1999, the military base has been deserted. It is a weird landscape to find oneself coming ashore onto. The closest shopping, action, restaurants, laundry, curios and handicrafts were a half-hour's walk away in the town of Balboa. Then from Balboa it was a couple dollars' taxi ride into Panama City, a metropolis of 2 million people. We arrived early on Friday morning and waited for our agent, Pete Stevens, to show up. Pete Stevens was charged with clearing us in and out of Panama and dealing with the officials of the Canal. Before Pete Stevens arrived, the canal admeasurer, an American expatriate named John showed up. He came aboard and started answering our questions in a relaxed, colloquial, joking manner. Then he looked at Sugar and asked, "Have you been through the Canal before? I think I know you." "I was through once, a long time ago," Sugar replied. "1982." "Hmm. Darn. You look familiar. What vessel?" "The Pride of Baltimore." "That's right! I measured the Pride of Baltimore. I remember you." After clueing us in on Canal procedure, etiquette, life in Panama and whatever other questions we had, John turned to Mikey and said, "Okay. You're now an official apprentice admeasurer. Come with me." And he took Mikey on deck to do his measurements. [Mikey, upon reading this, wanted it noted that John mistook him for Alcyone's first mate, a natural error given Mickey's size, bearing and the air of maturity he exudes when he first makes your acquaintance and his adolescent affectations are relatively subdued.] Sometime during this process Pete Stevens showed up. Pete Stevens is a ruddy complexioned white-haired Brit. He and John immediately fell into relaxed, mock-abusive banter. For instance, as Pete Stevens was approaching the boat in one of the Balboa Yacht Club launches, Jeff stuck his head below and asked John if Pete Stevens might be the white-haired gentleman on his way to the boat. John replied, "If he's got a British accent, it's Pete Stevens, but he's no gentleman." They were both funny and informative. Friday afternoon we did our Costco Provisioning and caught our first glimpse of Panama City. It is a big city, spread out, with lots of different neighborhoods that you'd zoom through in a taxi and wonder what the significance of this or that landscape was. There was Via Espagne, the big, one-way shopping street with every upscale store you could imagine, a 24-hour grocery store, a mall with a Ferris wheel and bumper cars on the top floor and a McDonalds where, if you ordered a Happy Meal, you got a half hour free Internet time. Then there is also the old city. Panama City is the oldest city in North America. It was the Pacific port to which the Spanish would deliver all the treasures of the New World to be transported across the Isthmus of Panama and then on to Spain. It was once looted and burned by the pirate Henry Morgan. There are narrow streets and multi-storied, decaying colonial-style buildings, slum-dwellers in tee shirts and shorts (our attire as well, come to think of it), some more upscale business people, young soldiers in fatigues with automatic weapons. The population in Panama is more African than the rest of Central America that we've seen since a lot of Jamaican labor was used in building the Canal. A group of us - Sugar, Harry, Jeff, Chris, Bridget and Mikey -- were out the next day in the old city, choosing streets on instinct, turning towards what seemed interesting. We came into a triangular square with some little stores (one selling religious mementos, a shoe repair place, a store selling dry goods and alcohol, a bar) when a woman came up and told us in Spanish that it was very dangerous there and that we must leave. It's dangerous at night, we asked? No. All the time, she said. Sugar had just before mentioned finding a bar and having a beer. What about a bar to have a drink at, we asked? No, she said. Go into a bar and they'll stab you (she made a stabbing gesture). Leave. We thanked her and kept walking. The area is run down and slummy, but also, with the old colonial architecture (some of it nearly in ruins) and the narrow streets and the press of activity we witnessed, it definitely had a definite charm and appeal. We ended up first in a very busy plaza where we had sugar cane juice from a stand. From there we wandered to a boulevard-sized walking street with bigger stores on each side, packed with pedestrians. On a side street there was a flea-market assemblage of stands selling crafts, magazines, cassettes, kitchen stuff, some vegetables -- you name it. It was covered continuously by awnings and there was just a sidewalk between the stands facing out from the middle of the streets and the stores in the buildings opposite. It was nicely crowded, sort of like wandering through a souk in North Africa. At one point a woman came up to Chris and Mikey and warned them that they were not safe there. Oh well. Panama City was also big government buildings of some kind (you rush by in a taxi so who knows?), a university, a big medical complex - much of it a mixture of grandeur and tropical decay. There are some project-like slums and then there are the handicrafts - molas and Panama hats and carvings and baskets woven so tight that they can hold water. It was mostly a whirl of things to see and experience and understand that we couldn't do justice to, but that called out to us in the day and a half we had there. Alcyone's Canal Transit Sunday morning, early, we began our transit of the canal. Bridget and Jeff had stayed out till after 2:00 AM the night before exploring Panama City discotheques, working from the assumption that if transiting the Canal was to be a day of backbreaking line handling you might be less aware of it with just three hours sleep. As it turned out, we had a relatively easy transit. The reason was that we shared the lock with a ship and a tug that went along with it. This mean that on the Pacific side, as we were being raised by a series of three locks to the level of Lake Gatun, we tied up alongside the tug, which was tied to the side of the lock. So the tug took the abuse of rising along side the wall of the lock, while we, with every fender aboard Alcyone and a couple of rent-a-tires inserted between us and the tug, rose placidly alongside. And we did not have to position Alcyone in the middle of the lock -- "center chamber" -- and do all the major line handling ourselves, trying to hold position in the middle of the lock as the water flooded in. There were several exciting moments. Coming along the tug was always exciting -- tugs are big burly creatures and you want to tie up right, not just to impress the tug boat crew. Watching the water start to burble up in whirlpool-like bubbles from the bottom was impressive, as was the moment when the big ship, which was perhaps 150 feet in front of us, started up its prop to move forward and sent back a wave of turbulence that set us back on our spring lines. And then there was the entire sense of history and geography that accompanied the transit. The doors to the locks are original, dating back to 1914 - massive, verdigris-green riveted numbers that are seven feet wide. Then there is the moment when the lock is filled up and you stand on the cabin top or on the main boom and look back over the door of the lock and see the 30 foot drop down to the level you've just risen above. Thirty feet of vertical distance may not sound significant to you, but think boats -- imagine yourself looking back from the crest of a 30-foot wave. Whoa! All around you is this massive engineering feat, something completed eighty-five years ago and still functioning. It is big, and at the same time it is big in this old, almost charming mid-industrial-revolution sort of way. It feels like it comes from the same era as when certain city halls and power company buildings and libraries and museums were constructed, with that solid, meant-to-last-forever, monumental style. When it was built the Canal could hold the largest ship built. It took ten years to build (and was finished two years ahead of schedule in 1914). The way the canal works is cool. Previously, a French company tried, and failed, to build a sea-level ditch all the way across the Isthmus, paralleling a railroad line that had been put in in 1855. The successful American effort involved raising ships by locks 85 feet above sea level to Gatun Lake, an artificial lake created by damming the Chargres River. At the time, it was the world's largest man-made lake, covering 163 square miles. You are raised up on one side to the level of the lake, you power across 30 miles of lake to the other side of the continent, then you take locks to go down to the other ocean. Voila! We learned so much about the Canal -- when you are there experiencing it, it is nearly impossible not to be aware of it, to be impressed by it, to pay attention to it. For instance, one thing that made the Canal feasible was the immense rainfall that feeds the Chargres River. Panama has the most rainfall on earth. It is this nearly inexhaustible supply of water that fills up the locks every time a ship goes up or down in the Canal. That in itself is amazing. They just keep pouring water from the Panamanian rainforest into the two oceans, and, although they do have to monitor its use, the truth is they never run out. So anyway, there was all this STUFF around us. The physical act of navigating Alcyone in these locks. The architecture and engineering of the Canal. The conceptual mind-bender that we'd get from one ocean to another with about ten hours of travel. The sense of history that kept expanding the more you looked around and learned and thought about it. One of the things we had looked forward to was traversing Gaillard Cut and Gatun Lake because we'd be sailing in fresh water!!! Imagine the laundry you could get done while powering four or five hours over fresh water. Our washdown pump, which normally pumps sea-water, would be spewing out FRESH WATER. (And, since we had to get across the lake quickly to make the transit in one day, Sugar had the engine RPM up, which drove the deck pump at a stronger-than-normal pressure.) Even though it was raining by the time we hit Gatun Lake, everyone took showers on deck using the washdown hose. Then everyone did their laundry. Then it rained harder and more continuously and we appreciated that December is just on the cusp of the end of the rainy season, and we were seeing some serious rain. The next day we had to find a Laundromat to dry all our newly clean clothes. That in itself was a novel experience on a trip where we'd gotten used to moaning about the heat and bright sun pretty regularly. We had TWO pilots -- Alberto, who got on at 5:30 in the morning in Balboa and guided us through the Pacific locks and through Gaillard Cut (an eight-mile-long trench cut through the mountains of the Continental Divide that leads from the Pacific locks to Gatun Lake) to somewhere on Gatun Lake; and then Victor, who joined us on Gatun Lake and saw us down to the Atlantic. They'd come zooming up on 40' pilot boats with freeboard higher than Alcyone (the coming-alongside of one of the boats put a slight bend in one of Alcyone's stanchions). Again, things were big, industrial strength. And, for Alberto and Victor, it must have been a novelty to step DOWN onto the boat they were piloting rather than to climb up a ladder. In the last lock going down to the Atlantic we had a little excitement. It was raining and there was a bit of breeze on the nose and we missed the first throw to the bow of the tug to tie up. Sugar backed down in the lock to make a second pass. In the descending locks the big ship came in BEHIND us, so as Sugar was backing down this big orange hull twenty-five feet high was majestically moving into the space behind us. On the second pass Victor, the pilot, wanted Sugar to get a stern line to the tug. Sugar took a heaving line and got the stern line across, but the stern line hindered Sugar's ability to move the bow around, and by now the Alcyone's bow was being blown slowly downwind with our bowsprit headed for the opposite wall of the lock. Additionally, the ship slowly filling up the lock behind us sent a wave of moving water that overtook our stern and made steering less than normally responsive. By the time Sugar convinced the tug boat crew NOT to take up on the stern line so he could maneuver, Alcyone's transom had received a gentle crunch against the side of the tug. Then a heaving line made it across to our wandering bow, we wrestled the errant boat part back alongside the tug and everything was fine once more. Sugar commented that if that a bit of touch-up on the stern was the cost of Alcyone's transiting the Panama Canal, all things considered, we got off easy. Then they let the water slowly out (Harry was speculating how much you'd have to tip the lock attendants for them to open the gate when the lock was full so you'd just sort of waterfall down 30 feet all at once kind of like a ride at Disneyland) and we settled down in the last lock. We could look behind us and see the incongruous sight of a big ship peering down from the previous lock at what looked like a really significant height. You're just not used to seeing major shipping looming down on you from a different level. Then the big gates slowly opened and there was the Atlantic Ocean. We cheered. |