82km man made canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific, allowing passage between the oceans without navigating the dangerous Cape Horn, Magellan Passage or the Arctic and Beijing Straits.
Comprised of 3 sets of locks on either side of the Gatun lake, around 26m above sea level!
First step is to make sure you have a booking to travel (sorted by Clipper) it’s a pretty popular route!
On the day of our passage we were up nice and early, on the boat ready to slip lines at 5am. After motoring out to the start of the canal we had to collect our canal pilot who’s job is to navigate the boat safely across the canal. The pilot boat came alongside and our guy casually stepped across to start the process. Panama Canal pilots assume complete responsibility for the vessel they are on, the only place worldwide that the skipper isn’t liable for the vessel!
On the approach to the locks, we were sandwiched in a raft between Punta and Bermuda. This 3 boat trimaran now had steering controlled by the speed of either boat on the outside and the overall speed by us in the middle. Approx 2m on either side of the outer boats and we were followed in by UNICEF and HalongBay, also rafted together. Lines were thrown onto the the boats by Canal staff and these were used to keep the boats central in the channel as the water level goes up/down.
I mean, essentially they’re a massively scaled up version of locks on canals back home but they’re super impressive close up and the volume of water moved is immense.
They run 365 days a year and transport over 1000 ships from one ocean to the next.
Initially started by the French who wanted a channel from one side to the other, after large amounts of politics the Americans finished the canal after realising that damming the river and building locks to lift the ships at one end and return them at the other side was the only way this could work.
Now there’s actually two sets of locks at each location; a newer, wider set for the new Panamax ships from 28.5 to 49m wide!
Our dinky yachts got a lot of attention from the canal operators, lots of cheers and pics- I guess something new and exciting to break up the monotony of large red and black tankers! We also felt tiny inside the huge channels, despite going through the older set of locks.
A nice 6 hour motor along the lake ended with a little traffic jam for the set of locks to take us down into the Atlantic.
After the final set of gates opened up it was all quite emotional – finally on the same body of water as England, the end is really real now!
The pilot was dropped off and we continued to Shelter Bay on the Atlantic side, ready to wait for another 5 boats the next day and Qingdao another day later.
It was a special and fantastic experience and obviously had to be done whilst wearing a Panama hat- my first souvenir of the race so far ☺️
Rachel's Race around the World 