S/V Mojombo: Hello Pacific Ocean

Hello to all you folks out there who are reading this blog. Our journey to the Pacific Ocean started in Portobello (a place Dad tells me he has done a most interesting blog piece on). We started by filling out forms and sending them into the Panama Canal Authority to be approved. On Monday the twentieth Mum and Dad bused into Colon which is where the canal starts and is administered from to pay our transit toll. Mum and Dad each had one thousand dollars hidden around them making a total of two thousand dollars. Having paid our money we were ready to go.

Adventure number one
At three o’clock in the afternoon on Monday the 13 of January we motored towards the Gatun Locks. We were following a big ship into the locks and dad was carefully keeping his distance from the big ship. He suddenly leapt from the helm and raced down stairs to the engine. A few minutes later he came upstairs and told us the gearbox was dead. Our transit advisor who coordinates with head office radioed for help and we were towed back to the anchorage. Later when we pulled the gear box off we found that the torsion dampener had broken. This meant that there was no power being supplied to the gear box. $60 later and the gear box was fixed. We were worried about how much money we mite have to pay the canal authority considering we were towed and the transit advisor was on board. Luckily we only paid a very small fee.

Our tow boat which takes us back to Colon

Adventure number two
Ready to go again we decided to top up on fuel. Mum went ashore with the jerry jugs. She came back and we poured the fuel into the tank. On the second trip Mum found out that we had just poured 30 liters of petrol into our diesel tank! After a lot of frustrated looks Dad goes below and starts searching the internet to see if the petrol would affect the engine. Searches revealed that the engine will either run perfectly, not at all or lose lots of power and be badly damaged. In the end we spent the after noon jugging near three hundred litres of fuel ashore to be disposed of. The next morning we refueled the boat and bled the engine and it ran fine.

Adventure number three
Some days later at six oclock in the evening our transit advisor boarded the boat and Mojombo turned her prow towards the Gatun locks. We were alone and would be going center chamber behind a big ship. Center chamber means that we have a line from all four corners of the boat to the side of the lock. As we entered the locks metal balls covered in string and with string trailing out behind also known as monkey fists were thrown down onto our boat. We attached the monkeys fists to our dock lines and the lines were pulled towards the lock walls and fastened. As the locks filled we had to constantly pull in the lines. Because there were three locks each time we moved between locks the lines had to be pulled in so the was only a thin line between us and the lock walls. I enjoyed every minute of it pulling on lines and looking in awe as we rose up. That night we tied up to a large ship mooring buoy on Gatum Lake.

The lock gates close behind us sealing our fate.

Brian and myself control the bow lines.

The next day our transit advisor arrived at 8:30 am and we got under way immediately. The first part of the trip was to cross the man made Gatun Lake. Crossing the lake was weird because either side of the channel the dead trunks of trees that used to grow in these now flooded mountain valleys stick up out of the water. Reaching the other side we entered Gillard Cut, the longest, deepest man made trench in the canal that cuts through the continental divide. All along the canal big suction dredges are enlarging the canal as part of the expansion program. On reaching the other end of the canal we entered the locks and rafted up to a yacht that was rafted to another yacht which was tied to the wall. On the way down we were in front of a large car carrier. When moving between locks we had to un-raft and let the other boats move up and raft up again.

Small islands can be seen across Gatun Lake

We relax in the shade of the cockpit while our Transit Advisor reads the morning paper

Gillard Cut: the rock cliffs of the continental divide.

As we exited the final lock and entered the Pacific Ocean we were so relieved. On our third attempt we had made it to the Pacific Ocean. We are now on our home run and the only thing that separates us from home is the world’s biggest ocean. But that isn’t a problem!

Moments before being hit our wonderful line handlers pose for a photo. Brian and Dorothy helped us on all of our attempts and never got fed up with our failures.

The wow factor
The canal I have to say was amazing, The sheer scale of work carried out here was astonishing. And the original lock gates are still there and still work after a hundred years.. And when you see them open it’s simply wow! And when you see the sides of hills and the fact that the canal has just cleaved them in two – that’s another wow. I will always remember the canal and I plan on coming back to see the enlargements made.