Panama Log page 2

Aid to S/V Grace
            Our friends Scott and Sharon aboard S/V Geisha started turning on the single side band radio at 7:30 each night when their friends sailed to Ecuador some months back. As more cruisers made the trip, Scott and Sharon were there to take their latitude and longitude and chat on the radio as the long night watch began. Over the course of several months,  more cruisers checked in. Occasionally, sailors reported problems to Scott and Sharon and they were able to provide some assistance.   S/V Grace was such a boat.



            Forgive my digression at this point, for while many people would start the tale with the identification of equipment failures, the beginning of the story dates back several more weeks, to when Grace first crossed the equator. Indeed, only skillful cross-examination uncovered the whole story. Sailors, particularly former airline pilots, are prone to start a story of mishap at the point of equipment failure, rather than to explore the root cause, which is a link in the chain of causation far more remote in both time and space than the actual equipment failure.

Paying Homage to Neptune

            After several changes of heart, Jerry and Ellen aboard Grace decided to sail to Ecuador, their longest offshore passage up to that time. They sailed wide of Colombia because of the stories of civil strife and the war on drugs. After several days at sea, they approached the equator.  Jerry had been saving a bottle of fine French wine for 25 years for just such an occasion. At precisely the moment they crossed the equator, they uncorked one of the best wines they had ever tasted. So fine was this wine, they later allowed, that the dose they poured to Neptune might have been thought to be niggardly.  Jerry squirms a little answering questions on this subject, so there is a fair inference that he didn’t give Neptune his due at all!  As things later developed, we now know that a larger dollop of less noble wine would have been far better.

            Grace had engine problems then sail problems about 300 miles offshore. The wind and seas grew and they were in the snot for three days. Scott assisted in remedying the engine problems over the radioand we both sailed out 50 miles to provide fuel when Grace arrived in the Perlas Islands outside of Balboa.  We will surely profit from Grace’s   misfortune. We have decided that when we cross, we will toast with cheap wine and give Neptune a hell of a slug.

S/V Grace transits the Panama Canal
            Although Ann and I did not take High Drama through the Canal, we served as line handlers on S/V Grace.  The Canal runs southeast to northwest for a distance of approximately 50 miles  from deep water in the Pacific to deep water in the Atlantic. Ships are raised 85 feet in a series of three locks, they next cross a man made lake,  they then go down three locks to sea level in the other ocean. The average ship transits in about 10 hours. Most sailboats take two days and spend a night at anchor in Lake Gatun. Sailboats pay between $500 and $750 to transit whereas the largest cruise ships pay as much as $150,000. About 14,000 ships transit each year, traveling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Captains on large ships must yield navigational control of their vessel to a canal pilot. This gives massive cognitive dissonance to US Navy commanders. However, an “advisor” is assigned to sailboats, and the sailboat captain maintains navigational control.

For a superb readable account of the history of the Panama Canal, see David McCullough’s A Path Between the Seas.  Indeed, the book reads like an intrigue novel, which the history of the Canal was!  Below are a few pictures of the transit that we took as crew on S/V Grace.

                                     In first lock.