The Canal Zone
After a short overnight passage from Guna Yala, we entered the Canal Zone. This area was under the control of the United States until December 31st, 1999. A treaty was signed by President Carter in 1977 that outlined the gradual handover of the Canal Zone back to Panama.
The Panama Canal handles 3% of global shipping, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that is a lot. As such, the canal waters are strictly controlled. We had to call to the control office when we were about 5 miles away to request permission to approach the breakwater before proceeding. Large ships are required to have tug boats assigned before they can approach the locks; a new measure after the Suez Canal debacle several years back.
Shelter Bay Marina
We got permission and went on in to a slip at Shelter Bay Marina, on what used to be Fort Sherman military base.
The base is pretty remote and is dense jungle, which turned out to be a really neat feature.
Grete and I went for several runs and we all did a little bit of walking around the surrounding area. We saw, howler monkeys (and heard them constantly), agoutis (which we refer to as mouse pugs), and coatis (aka nose bears).
We spent 15 days in the marina but it didn’t seem very long at all. Part of that is because I was deathly ill, thanks again to the old guy coughing up a storm on the shopping shuttle bus, for 3-4 days. Another part is because for the last several months, we have been arranging to meet up with our old friends from Catnip (who have since sold their boat and moved back to land) in old town Panama City.
Casco Viejo, Panama
In order to maximize our time with Catnip, we booked a hotel for two nights in the old town about 2-3 blocks from their AirBnB. We stayed in Casco Viejo, the second old-town in Panama City. After the famed pirate Henry Morgan burned Panama Viejo in 1671, destroying it, the locals rebuilt on a small peninsula founding the second old town, Casco Viejo.
Our first night was a room in a hostel with barracks-like bunk beds, which the kids were excited about.
It was very loud near our room because it was New Year’s Eve and the partying went on all night so we slept like trash. In the morning I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee in the lounge and looked out the window to see a live episode of Cops.
No wonder it was loud, I could have literally reached through our window and poked the cops and the people getting busted. That hostel was booked the second night though, so we had to move to another nearby hotel which was much nicer. We had a two-bedroom apartment with a pool and rooftop seating. It was very fancy, just like me.
We spent a little over two days hanging out with them pretty much all day, exploring the town, some food, and each others company. We fell right back in with them and really had a great time.
In addition to food and drinks, we took one day to hang out at the pool and another day to go on a walking tour of Casco Viejo, a UNESCO world heritage site. Stops included the white house, old buildings from the 1500s, and several beautiful cathedrals, one of which was a Cathedral Basilica, blessed by Pope Francis in 2019.
In St Francis of Assisi church, a woman ushered us into some strange back room but we didn’t know what was going on. After a minute or two she told us she had to go but brought us into a little room with an elaborate Christmas village that the kids were very happy to see.
We were drawn into the church in part due to the viewing platform high above the street below. I think it was $5 per person but we got to see some pretty blue stained glass windows and were afforded amazing views of Panama City in every direction.
Like other old towns in this part of the world, the town is a mix of historical buildings that are preserved with the help of UNESCO funding, new buildings with modern architecture and businesses to keep money flowing out of the tourists’ pockets, and old structures that were never renovated after the fires in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Back in Shelter Bay Marina
After our three day mini-vacation, we went back to the marina to start our preparations for our canal transit. We visited the dentist, Fira got two fillings, and stocked up on a few supplies. In addition, we received our brand new steering sheave assembly and hired the marina workers to change it out (more on that below).
One day, I took the shuttle in to do some shopping and some old guy was coughing really bad the whole way there. On the return trip he was coughing a ton again and even his wife wasn’t sitting next to him. It seemed like a bad thing to me. Sure enough, two days later I was deathly ill with a fever and cough that lasted the next 3 days before tapering off for the next few days. The crew of Country Roads was on the same shuttle and they too got very sick. Through some small miracle, no one else on the Hoss got sick.
Since I was still sick and our friends were also sick, Dublin had a very low-key birthday. I managed to bake him a cake and of course we had pancake breakfast, so not all was lost. The heat of the tropics melts icing pretty quickly though, the top layer was definitely slip-sliding all over. It tasted great though, and since we were somewhat quarantined, we got to eat the entire thing ourselves.
The rest of our time mostly involved meeting with the canal agent, Rogelio, and just taking care of small maintenance items like oil and fuel filter changes, etc.
On our last full day in Shelter Bay, we rented a car in order to run errands in Colon. We also took advantage of having the car in order to go to another UNESCO world heritage site at the mouth of the Rio Chagras, the Castillo de San Lorenzo Real de Chagras. The castle/fort was in pretty good shape after restorations in the 1980s and beyond and the vantage point over the Rio Chagras was delightful.
The vantage point was very important since before the Panama Canal was built, the Rio Chagras made up a huge portion of the Camino Real de Cruces, one of two main paths across the isthmus of Panama. The fort saw a lot of action and was destroyed several times by invaders and conquerors. Of course now, it is just a tourist stop for folks like us.
Transit
The transit of the canal was an amazing thing to witness. It is the most out-of-our-hands experience we have had in some time. Canal waters are strictly controlled and you must request dates well in advance, etc. Additionally, you have a advisor on board for the entire transit who tells you what to do the whole time. It takes the tension away for sure, but it also feels strange to not really be in command of our own vessel.
The cost for this 12,000 mile shortcut was about $3,700, so it was important that everything went exactly to plan. If we had caused any kind of delay, we would have been fined a base charge of $500 but rates shoot up from there. They take things quite seriously.
Trouble
Well, right off the bat, we were trouble. We hired three line handlers (4 are needed and Grete was our 4th, I had to drive) and they were on board at the marina as we pulled away from our slip. As a Navy man, I was leaving almost an hour and a half before it was our time to get our advisor at a spot about 15 minutes away. I figured if we got there super early we could just drive in circles or whatever. As I backed out of the slip, the boat felt weird. I didn’t feel like I had any control over where we were pointed. We were in a fairly tight spot with a huge submerged concrete block that would ruin our rudder in a hurry. So we ended up going right back into our slip.
I took a few relaxing breaths and decided to try again. Luckily we had huge rental fenders and three professional line handlers helping us in and out. This second time felt the same way and I was concerned that I was doing something really wrong. I could not understand how I seemed to have such poor control over our boat. When pulling back in to the slip (actually the vacant slip next to where we left from) I tried steering in and noticed that right full rudder sent the boat to the left. Swung the wheel the other way and sure enough, I was able to control the boat, by steering in the opposite direction.
We got into the slip and I dove into the sweat pit lazarette. I noticed immediately that when they had installed the new steering sheaves, they failed to cross the steering cables so the steering was reversed. The marina staff got the workers back to our boat in a matter of minutes and, with my help, we got things straightened out in about 30-45 minutes. We ended up getting underway just in time to make our pickup. The skiff carrying the advisor came into the marina and we had to awkwardly stop near the end of a dock to do the personnel transfer, but it all went well and we were on our way to the locks.
The Locks
Before we came to Panama and started looking into all of this, I don’t think I knew anything about the Panama Canal. Perhaps like so many things in school I slept through it or something, but I knew nothing. The biggest thing is that the canal isn’t a massive concrete canal like I thought it would be, that allowed boats to drive from one ocean to the other. It is a series of three locks that lift boats nearly 90 feet up from the Atlantic side into Gatun Lake, a massive man-made reservoir, and then three more locks down on the Pacific side.
The locks are fairly large and hold massive container ships. They aren’t big enough for two at a time though, so what they do is have 2-3 small boats like ours tie up together and go in right behind the big boat. It’s pretty wild and somewhat dangerous, but the risks are very easy to control so we were not as risk at all.
The gates close us into a lock on the Atlantic side.
Now up we go about 25-30 feet. We did this three times to get into Gatun Lake.
The French started trying to dig through and tons of people were dying and little real progress was being made. They did literally move mountains creating what is called the Culebra Cut and it is still an important part of the transit. But ultimately, in 1904 the US took over and decided to lift boats over the isthmus rather than punch through it. The idea works quite well and even makes it so that the majority of the path is a beautiful ride through a freshwater lake.
The Lake
We had a 3:15 start time for our transit. The total length is about 40 miles from Shelter Bay to our anchorage on the Pacific side, so it had to be completed over two days. As such, we spent the night in Gatun Lake. It was a fairly bad night of sleep with wakes shaking us about and a strange side tie to a huge mooring ball. It was also a bit strange because there were three grown men sleeping topside (the advisor went home for the night but line handlers stay).
The lake was pretty and we had to move about 30 miles from the mooring until the first of three locks would bring us back down to sea level. One cool perk of the freshwater is that soft marine growth dies within a few hours or so of being submerged in freshwater. So simply being in the lake overnight gave the Hoss a nice bottom cleaning.
Down to the Pacific
On our way down, we were tied two boats across, instead of the three across we had on the way up. On the way down, we were in front of the big ship too, so a few things were a little bit different. For scale, here is a shot of us next to one of the bigger ships, no bananas were available for scale. Our boat is 47 feet long and the one next to us is 1,000 feet long.
When those big things pull in behind you, you really hope that those little railroad cars that handle their lines are strong enough to stop them from making toothpicks out of the boat.
My old Navy friend and fellow sailor Mark Dresser was watching us on the webcams maintained by the canal authorities and grabbed a screenshot of us on day two.
The massive gates close in and it feels like some medieval fortress.
With just one lock to go, we took a family picture on the bow with the Pacific Ocean, our home for the next few years, in the background. One lock away from being members of the Order of the Ditch.
New Ocean
And that was it. We entered the Pacific Ocean, saw some crocodiles, capybara, deer and other wildlife and tried to reflect on what we just did. As we passed under the Bridge of the Americas, connecting roads to North and South America over the canal, we dropped off our line handlers, extra lines and fenders and lastly the advisor. We were back on our own and headed to our next anchorage in Panama City to prepare for our trip north.
