First Canal Transit!

Greetings from Shelter Bay Marina!

   We have been here for a few days now and enjoying some down time as well as preparing for the Pacific Ocean. In order to transit the Canal, boats are required to have 5 people on board as "line handlers." Ian the captain of Yantina asked me if I would transit with them Saturday into Sunday, so I got my first canal experience this past weekend! Quester is going through tomorrow along a with 12 other Oysters. I have some pictures of the first transit, and as you can see they rafted up 3 Oysters and had them motor in together. A strong cross breeze made for an stressful few hours of motoring through the locks. We went through the Gatun locks into the lake on Saturday afternoon tied up next to a 46 boat named Flower Girl. We spent he night at the anchorage on the other side of the locks. The morning started out with some excitement when the anchor alarm going off at about 5:15 am, due to the fact that the wind had shifted. Normally this isn't a problem, but since the canal is such a high traffic area we had to anchor extremely close to shore, and when the wind shifted we spun dangerously close to a rock bulked. Ian and I were able to pull up the anchor and avoided catastrophe, and just motored around until our canal transit adviser arrived at 6am.
 
  The morning continued with excitement as the yacht Babe! accidentally started playing chicken with a 800ft tanker crusing at 15 kts. After the tanker let out 5 loud blasts from the fog horn they managed to steer clear of any danger with a few hundred feet to spare. We continued along the channel an onto the "cut" which is the narrowest stretch of the canal. We passed two Panamax (Panamax is the largest possible ship the locks can fit measuring 975 ft long and 105 ft wide), tankers heading east along the way through the cut and had to thread the needle between the ships and the shore. Ian let me pilot Yantina the whole day on Sunday as we motored through the canal and up alongside Dreams Come True and tossed over some dock lines to complete the raft. Dreams Come True was the middle boat, and In Flagranti (my favorite Oyster name... http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_flagranti ) was the other side.

   We made it through the Milaflores Locks without incident and underneath the Bridge of the Americas and anchored at the La Playita Marina near Panama City. Look for another update of Questers crossing when we get there on Wednesday.