Panama Canal – Gateway to the Pacific

The Panama Canal is a truly imposing gateway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. To pass through its gigantic locks, built nearly a century ago, is not only an incredible experience, but also a milestone for any sailor.

Port of Colon
The Atlantic Port of Colon is shrouded in a damp, early morning mist as we guide our yacht towards ‘The Flat’, the canal waiting area for yachts. The air is heavy with diesel, as enormous ships mill silently in every direction around us. In the ambient glow of the town we begin to make out the shape of yachts anchored ahead of us, our spirits lift, we are amongst friends.

Controlled by trade winds and ocean currents, the annual migration for cruising yachts heading from the Atlantic into the Pacific, is between February and May. Yachts can be delayed by up to two weeks through sheer weight of cruising traffic and Colon is no place to spend one day more than you have to.

Once a colourful gold rush town, Colon is now a tired, untidy sprawl, with old colonial houses rotting where they stand and stinking rubbish left abandoned in the streets. No drivers stop at traffic lights or zebra crossings, instead car doors are locked and guns are carried in glove boxes. At night, tourists have 100 per cent chance of being mugged. On the bright side, the Panama Yacht Club is a friendly place, the beers are cheap and almost everything can be arranged from the office.

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Canal Paperwork
Since the 50-mile canal opened for business in 1914, over 874,000 vessels have transited the waterways, with around 250-300 yachts a year. In 1999, our first transit, the running of the canal was handed over by the Americans to the Panamanians. Despite rumours of the canal running out of water and transit costs increasing, we have only see improvements. In 1999 we did all the transit paperwork ourselves, this meant a rather worrying trip around various offices scattered around the city with fistfuls of cash. Happily it can now all be done by credit card at the nearest bank.

This time we streamlined the complicated affair of booking our transit by using Tina McBride, a Panama Canal transit agent. With Tina’s contacts we are measured, paid up, cleared with customs and immigration and equipped with four 125ft lines by lunchtime the following day. Four line handlers and a skipper are compulsory on every yacht; luckily we have some fellow sailors keen to come with us for the experience, before they take their own boats. This is a better option than commercial line handlers who are expensive to hire, but beware of hitchhikers who know nothing about boats, the strain on the ropes as the locks fill is huge and requires good boat handling skills. Our final job is sourcing 24 old, car tyres and wrapping them neatly in bin liners. This is not a great look for a cruising yacht but crucial in protecting the hull and toe rail from damage in the vast locks.

Locking Up
Before dawn, two days after our arrival in Colon, our ‘Adviser’, leaps on board. Each yacht is allocated an adviser, much like a pilot, who is trained to show us the ropes and help us through the complicated locking systems. His first job is to lead us through the dark to Gatun locks, the first of the six locks we will encounter today.

There is something surreal about entering our first lock of the Panama Canal in the weak light of dawn. We have reached the point of no return as we leave the Caribbean waters behind us, by the end of the day we will be in the Pacific.

Our Adviser instructs us to ‘nest’, this means enter the lock with two other yachts attached either side of us. As the larger yacht at 62ft, we are in control and it is our engine that powers the nest, and our lines that are led ashore. We are told that yacht accidents are few, those that happen are generally due to cleats, fairleads and ropes giving way and yachts hitting the walls. We know of one yacht that will be left behind this season having lost much of its bow section after a rope snapped.

As we enter the lock, monkey fists rain down on us from above, we hastily tie our lines to them and watch as they are dragged back up to giant bollards on the lock walls. Ahead of us, a Cypriot bulk carrier is being held in place by wires attached to four electric locomotives that run on tracks along the walls. As the vast lock gates close behind us we feel tiny and vulnerable in a cage of concrete and steel.

A Feat of Engineering
Little has changed since the locks were built in the early 1900s, an incredible engineering achievement in itself. The vast concrete locks are as high as six storey buildings and use 197 million litres of fresh water for each locking. This water begins to boil in from underwater channels and our Adviser calls for us to take up the slack. We heave and heave for nearly 15 minutes, until we are at eye level with the giant bollards. Our nest is still square in the middle of the lock, we have done well and are invited to move through the next two locks. Just as our muscles are beginning to give up, the third lock gate opens and the Cypriot ship leads us into Gatun Lake, 26 metres above sea level.

This 31-mile, man-made lake is yet another engineering work of art. We are motoring through what was once a jungle, now a flooded network of navigable channels controlled by mighty dams. We can hear the howler monkeys from the distant shore mocking us as we take the Banana Cut, a short cut for yachts, meanwhile the ships glide between small lush islands disappearing and appearing with surprising ease.

Building the Canal
It was the French that began building the Panama Canal in 1879. In those days Malaria and Yellow Fever was rife, striking down half of the workforce. Ironically, the local doctors didn’t know the illnesses were mosquito born, and hospital beds were placed in bowls of water to keep the ants away, providing virulent mosquito breeding pools. After nine years, the French canal attempt failed due to bad management and planning, leaving the way clear for the Americans.

The American effort was given a huge boost as mosquitoes were identified as the carriers of disease. It took a further ten years and 75,000 people to slice through the mountains, blast the rock, build the largest locks in the world and complete the canal. The statistics are formidable, if all the earth extracted from the canal were lined up in a train of dirt carts, it would circle the world four times around the equator. The total price in human life is sobering. 500 lives for every mile of the canal, totalling 25000 dead, over three quarters of these during the French era.

Gatun Lake comes to an end and we enter Gaillard Cut. This Cut caused the biggest headache in the building of the canal. As fast as the workforce carved a trench through the rock and shale, repeated landslides filled it in again. For us, this is the middle marker of our Panama passage. Behind us is the oppressive, stagnant, humid air of Colon, ahead of us is the fresh, salt air of the Pacific.

Going Down
At last we are going down again. Pedro Miguel is the first lock to drop us an initial 9.4 metres, followed by Miraflores, the final set of two locks that lowers us into the Pacific. Miraflores also has an Internet web cam for friends at home to watch your progress. Our Adviser has asked us to tie up alongside a tug, not our favourite option, as the tug’s huge, black rubber bumper wants to decorate our white hull with nasty marks. With a bit of careful tyre shifting we escape unscathed.

The lock gates open for the final time and we cast off the tug and motor out towards the Pacific. As a larger yacht, able to maintain a motoring speed over 5 knots, we complete the transit in one day. For smaller yachts, an overnight stay in Gatun Lake is the hot and sticky alternative. As we pass under the Bridge of the Americas, the main artery between North and South America, we feel triumphant, relieved and excited. In the last nine hours, we have experienced one of man’s greatest engineering achievements, the linking of two mighty oceans through a terrestrial divide. We quietly pay homage to the engineers and scientists who saved us from a 9,000-mile trip around Cape Horn.

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