About an hour before our scheduled canal passage, we were running the GenSet, and suddenly heard an explosion of water in the walls. The high loop for the raw water intake had exploded and was shooting water everywhere. We had to quickly come up with a solution to make our passage in time. We rigged up a softwood plug on a hose to stop any water from getting out. Shockingly, the pressure is great enough in the hose that the water is forced through the material in the softwood plug and seeps out of the soaked plug.
The canal passage went really smoothly. We rafted with a catamaran with a group of French people and went through the canal with them.
Our boat was significantly heavier than the catamaran, so there were a few scary moments when we almost drove them into the wall.
The first thing you do when passing through the canal is meet up with your pilot and any linehandlers you hire. The linehandlers sleep on your boat and you have to feed them and the pilot during the whole passage.
You have to 'catch' them, tie them to your rented polypropelene lines (that guide you through the canal), and then they pull the one end of your polypropelene line to the canal walls (the other end being attached to your boat).
They use these to try and keep your rafted boat mass in the center of the canal. However, the monkeyfists are thrown from like 50 feet above and away from you, so they end up just flying over your boat, wrapping around your standing rigging, and hitting your crew.
It then becomes a mad scramble to get them and tie them to the polypropelene line before we drove the catamaran into the wall, haha.
The doors shut after the boats are secure and they start filling the lock with water, and as a linehandler, you just pull up the polypropelene line as it becomes slack.
It was unbelievable, the amount of force on those lock doors. The canal is truly one of the modern wonders of the world and quite the achievement for mankind.
There were three locks before Lake Gatun (and had to repeat this each time). We then stayed overnight in Lake Gatun and waited for our scheduled passage through the second set of locks (on the Pacific side) early in the morning.
Lake Gatun is incredibly beautiful, and it was very surreal cruising through it early the next morning and seeing these HUGE cargo ships anchored everywhere in such a relatively small lake.
On the Pacific side, there was another set of three locks to bring us back down to sea level, and the process was the exact opposite of the first three locks.
After that, we were officially in the Pacific Ocean! We motored around a bit until we found a decent anchorage so we could spend a couple nights preparing the the next month and a half of sailing. The anchorage is amazing here, we get to watch the sunset over the mountains to the west every evening,
and then have the entire skyline and city lights of Panama City to the east.
ps. I didn't see any salt water crocodiles...
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