Hauled Out and Through the Panama Canal
One week we were anchored off uninhabited islands in Bocas del Toro, and the next, Scout was sitting in Bahía Limón, surrounded by container ships all queuing for the Panama Canal. We weren’t transiting for another month, but the Pacific was suddenly very close.
First, though, there was the haul-out. We’d booked Scout into Shelter Bay Marina for a bottom job and some rest, but the travel lift crew ran out of daylight, so we spent the night dangling in the slings. I can report that it was, against all expectation, a perfectly good night’s sleep, and honestly more relaxing than the choppy bay we’d been anchored in all day!
Then came the waiting. The team at Shelter Bay were excellent, but a clean hull takes as long as it takes. We were in London for Christmas, with the boat on the hard in Panama, waiting for the antifouling to dry. The noforeignland app even sent us one of its sad little messages about it, which did make us laugh.
Splash day finally came in early January, and it is never not nerve-wracking. But Scout floated, as she always does, and suddenly the canal was only a week away.
Canal prep: extra fenders, and a hundred feet of docking lines. Check!
And then it was time for the transit itself, which took two days.
First were the Gatun Locks. We rafted Scout up as the middle of three sailboats, tucked in behind a container ship, and rose 90 feet. That night we slept in Gatun Lake, moored in the middle of a flooded rainforest valley, surrounded by container ships, and falling asleep to the sound of howler monkeys mixed with passing diesel engines.
The next morning we motored the length of the lake, paused to let one of the giant Neopanamax ships go past the other way, and then entered the famous Culebra Cut, motoring through a mountain range and across the continental divide of the Americas.
Finally, the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks dropped us back down to sea level, this time with an audience in the grandstands at Miraflores. And then the gates opened and there it was: the Pacific Ocean! After two and a half years in the Atlantic and Caribbean, it was quite a moment.
Like most things on a sailboat, the canal involved hours of sitting around, interrupted by moments of intense stress. Tying Scout onto the side of a tourist ship in 15 knots of wind, with a gigantic container ship behind us pushing three knots of current down the channel, was one of those moments. But we all made it through unscathed: us, Scout, our much-appreciated line-handling crew, and our onboard canal officials.
So in two days we took Scout out of the Caribbean, climbed 90 feet, crossed a giant man-made lake, motored through a mountain range, and dropped back down the other side into the Pacific, through a piece of engineering over a century old. It still feels a little surreal.
And now, our Pacific adventures begin!
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