The day dawns with watery sunshine and a shout from the crew that the new pilot is arriving. They have been watching the pilot boat pulling up to all the other boats and waking their crews up with a foghorn. Amazingly, Mike is still asleep and Jim calls down to him to tell him of the imminent arrival of the pilot. I stay in bed longer, after all, I need my cups of tea before I emerge. The crew do their best to wake me by pulling up the anchor. The anchor chain, note, all 270 feet of it, clatters into a chamber just behind my head. Ignoring it is a practised art and I have perfected it. Mike does, however, bring me my cup of tea, telling me that the crew are ‘revolting’. I knew that already!
Moses, our pilot, is every bit as nice as Ivan. We start the engines and begin to motor through the lake (you are not allowed to sail through).
It’s the second largest man-made lake in the world, and lots of work is still going on along it – dredging, widening, making new channels (some of which have been abandoned). There are lots of small, uninhabited islands. One used to have a tourist house on it which you could rent for the day and have barbecues on but since 9/11 it is no longer allowed because the house is so near the vital shipping lane. It is actually quite disconcerting going through such a narrow space so close to such HUGE ships.
What’s even more scary is when we motor past a ship which we passed out in the Caribbean which has now deliberately run aground because his engine has failed and he wants to make sure that he doesn’t drift in the channel (Moses has been listening on his radio and relays this to us as we go past.)
Old ‘eagle eyes’ Mike, armed with binoculars, even manages to spot a crocodile as we go through. These are normally relatively small but someone was eaten last year apparently so some are obviously big. Anyway he spots ears, eyes, a snout and a tail and Peter snaps it.
Going through the Culebra Cut, we see lots of white pipes sticking out of the ground and a large machine is shoving even more of them in deep. Moses explains that they are then filled with explosives and the whole thing blown up to widen the channels. When you see the size of the ships going through, you realise why they need to do this.
After about 28 miles and 4 hours later, we reach the far side of Gatun Lake and begin the process of rafting up again with the same two boats for Jeannius to pull them towards the Pedro Miguel lock for the first of the drops down towards the Pacific. We stop to do this just after the Centennial Bridge.
Once through the lock we stay rafted as it is only another mile to the two locks at Miraflores.
When we arrive at Miraflores Locks we are very excited as we have told everybody that we will be there. We spot the web cams positioned at the top of the spotlights and stand there waving. The crowds in the observation building obviously think we are waving to them and wave back. I feel like royalty!
We go through the same rigmarole as before but expect more turbulence as now we have fresh water rushing out to meet salt water although in the event nothing spectacular happens.
We sail out into the Pacific, un-raft from our two fenders (Kalliope III and Skylark) and celebrate with a bottle of bubbly. Unfortunately, our pilot/advisor, Moses, cannot join us as he is still on duty.
We have our first glimpse of Panama City behind all the industrial looking shipyards and warehouses then we sail under the Bridge of the Americas, and finally turn the corner and enter Flamenco Marina.
Flamenco Marina is full of sports fishing boats and huge gin palaces. This does not mean, however, that the surrounding are fantastic. We are placed on a floating pontoon that has neither electricity nor water. We later discover that all the pontoons are like this. At least the cats get to moor up together, alone at the far end of the mosquito pit. The monohulls in our fleet are rafted together further along.
We are visited very quickly by an official who says he has come to do a ‘Sanitation Inspection’ for the government. He checks our yellow fever injection certificates, gives us a completed form and charges us $46. Jim thinks we have been conned. I think it is Kocher but we have been fleeced by the government. No doubt we will find out.
In the evening we leave the marina and go to an Italian restaurant that Penny and Peter found a few days ago. The food is excellent and very reasonable, with the bill coming to $82 for 5 of us which included 2 bottles of wine.
Our midday position is: 8 deg 54 min N, 79 deg 31 min W
Distance so far: 1300 nautical miles
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