Panama: Day 11 - Pacific Ocean!

Thursday, March 21, 2013

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.

When you arrive just outside the canal at your scheduled time, you meet with your rafting partner boats and tie up side-by-side. One boat is assigned as the 'driving' boat who steers and powers the mass of rafted boats through the canal. The catamaran was assigned this role as cat's are far more agile than monohulls (we don't have bow thrusters). When you enter the first lock, you have to be ready as linehandlers from shore hurl these 'monkey fist' balls (attached to some thin line) at your boat.

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...

Panama: Day 10 - Canal Passage

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Sailing Across the Pacific Ocean (Part 7) - The Panama Canal

We are finally passing through the canal today! We fueled up and did some last minute jobs in the morning and are just waiting for the go-ahead at around 1:00pm.

The canal is really big, so we have to anchor mid-way through (in Gatun Lake) and spend the night. Gatun Lake is supposedly full of salt water crocodiles, so I will try to get some good pictures of them. They supposedly swim up to the boats because they are used to being fed by sailors (or maybe feeding ON sailors? My Spanish isn't very good.). We have a hired pilot and some line-handlers who have to stay on the boat with us for the duration and we have to feed them. If they do not like what we feed them (if it is not satisfactory), then we get charged for food to be delivered to them.

We have to raft up with two other boats and all three of us pass through the canal at the same time. I imagine this is an extremely scary and stressful experience for the boat owners. There is so much potential damage to the boat.

When we arrive on the Pacific side of the canal, we are going to drop anchor and make sure the boat is all ready for the 8 day journey to the Galapagos. Supplies are hard to get in the Galapagos, so we have to make sure we are well stocked NOW for our 30 day journey across the Pacific (when we leave the Galapagos).

I doubt we'll have internet in the canal or on the other side, so this will likely be my last blog entry until I hit the Galapagos. So look for a whole bunch of new entries around March 31st or April 1st!

Panama: Days 8 and 9 - Preparing for the Canal Passage

We sadly left Boquete early Monday morning and hopped on the bus back to the boat. We had a little scare when the customs agent boarded the bus and wouldn't take our passport photocopies. We had no problem on the way to Boquete with the copies, but on the way back he wanted the real passports. I didn't want to spend time in any sort of Panamanian prison of any sort. He eventually just let us go again. We were smart enough this time to bring sandwiches on the bus so we didn't have to eat "rat meat" again at the midway bus stop.

We spent the whole day on busses and finally got back to the boat around 10:00pm. We were tired and just went to bed.

Tuesday was spent getting a few things done on the boat to prepare for our canal passage on Wednesday. I also spent a good 4 hours at the gym to try to get as much of my weekly exercising in before we left. Nothing really exciting happened this day.

Panama: Day 6 and 7 - Mamallena & St. Patrick's Day

After a good 12 hour sleep to make up for the lack of sleep on the bus last night, we packed our stuff up and hopped on the bus to Boquete to check in to Hostal Mamallena. We are looking at booking some excursions through this new hostel. They offer a few jungle hikes that go to hidden waterfalls, hot springs, volcanoes, etc. You can also book a tour of a high-end coffee farm, which might be neat to see.

We originally were going to do a triple-combo walking tour that hit the hot springs, the hidden waterfall, and the swimming gorge but after meeting some cool Dutch guys, we decided to link up with them and go on an all-day biking tour that ended at the swimming gorge. We didn't know what we were in for...

We were warned it was a really tough course, but I felt I was pretty fit and could handle it. The course ended up being the most difficult and tiring 8-hour bike ride up and down huge mountains on the roughest terrain I have ever experienced. It was a real challenge.

The scenery was beautiful and we got to see pretty much all of the mountains surrounding Bouquete.

No Central-American bike tour is complete without a sketchy bridge.

Minnie getting patched up after a few spills, smiling as always.

The swim at the end was incredibly refreshing.

Unfortunately, I had no energy to do any swimming...except for a few badass cliff jumps.

With whatever small amount of energy we had at the end of the day, we bought in to the $7 - all you can drink St. Patrick's Day party at Mamallena. It was a really fun night and I met a lot of great people. We had a guy named Ben who randomly walked in and played the Tin Whistle all night. He was a master at it and could play all my requests.

Panama: Day 5 - Boquete!

We arrived in David at 6am as scheduled and hopped on the next bus to Boquete (an hour's drive). It was on one of their brightly and uniquely painted city buses that Panama is famous for. They are converted school buses that are each uniquely painted in bright colours with random images. The backrests were FAR too vertical though, it was really uncomfortable.

We were dropped off in Boquete just as the shops were opening up and I had a coffee at a really nice little coffee shop there.

Boquete has clearly a MUCH higher standard of living than other cities we've seen in Panama (especially Colon). It is really nice here. Our hostel (La Jungla) was still a short cab ride into the mountains, so after walking around a bit, we headed into the hills.

La Jungla is a hostel/animal conservatory and restaurant.

They have a pet spider monkey (Daisy),

two Capuchin monkeys,

a coarti (racoon/monkey thing),

a Macaw,

a bunch of parrots,

boa constrictors,

pythons,

a horse, goats,

dogs, a bunny, a huge surly rooster, and some other birds. You can interact with all of them except the spider monkey, which still has tantrums sometimes. The spider monkey is huge, I'd be a little scared interacting with her. I did get to feed her...through the bars.

Once settled in, we had a lunch at the restaurant here, and ordered the best pizza I've ever had. Just $8.00 for the pizza and $1.00 for a beer. Minnie and I split the bill and had enough food for both lunch and dinner.

The art work was a little trippy in the restaurant. The capuchins had all-too-humanlike faces and resembled some celebrities (William Dafoe, Nick Cage, Tommy Lee Jones) and there was a creepy sloth who looked like he had just the right amount of mushrooms.

William Dafoe

We went for a walk after lunch and found this little trail going down the steep mountain side to a river where wild bananas, lemons, and oranges grew.

Lemon Tree

The rainforest is much 'cleaner' here than it is down in Colon. You can easily walk through it without a machete and there were few bugs.

Minnie went for a nap afterwards and I hung around in the animal cages.

The owner let me in the Capuchin cage (which was the best moment of my life I think). They went ape-wild and immediately jumped on me when I walked in.

The one started licking inside my ear, at least buy me dinner first!

They both went bananas when I fed them (bananas). I love monkeys!

We bussed back to town for the evening and just walked around a bit. We got on the wrong bus initially (well, it was the right bus, but going in the wrong direction), which I am glad for as we got to drive around and see a lot of the beautiful mountains in Boquete. We saw some wild forest fires on the way back though, that was a little scary. It has been very windy here, so I guess they are spreading easily.

Tomorrow, we are moving to the hostel Mamallena, which is right in town. There are no other travellers at La Jungla and we were hoping to meet some new and interesting people.