Monday March 14th: for us, the end of our Panama sojourn. For Lutz and Gabi a new phase of their trip begins!

We enjoyed being with them and are thankful for that fun Canal transit experience! We wish them good luck for the sail across the Pacific and will follow their adventures thanks to their blog ! Hasta luego amigos!!!

Last day before our departure: we had a visit of Panama city with Gabi and Lutz. We know the town well by now and we had fun showing them our preferred spots!  There was spring in the air and trees in bloom added to the charm of the Plaza Major and the Casco Viejo.  We all treated ourselves to freshly pressed pineapple juice!

The trip by bus on the Amador Causeway was quite enjoyable and offered nice views of the city.

 Despite our excitement to have reached the pacific ocean, we were all tired: we said goodbye to Steve, our line handler who returned to his boat and his wife in Colon. We had a nice supper (sandwiches!) while enjoying the feeling of being anchored in the Pacific and went to bed early!

Adios Canal and hello Pacific! This was a great experience thanks to this wonderful crew aboard SuAn!

 We had an easier time today because we had trained the night before but also because we were descending... after the Pedro Miguel lock, we are entering the Miraflores lock, the last one before the Pacific.

After long hours of travel in the sun, we finally arrived to the locks: this time, we were three sailboats tied together and a fully loaded tourist boat who took hundreds of picture of us! What a treat for them!

The trip on Gatun lake was very interesting; this is the largest artificial lake in the world! It provides 33km of the waterway's total of 77km length with the ships (still) following the original course of the Rio Chagres. But works are underway to expand the canal, cutting away (with explosives, of course) large amounts of rocks, almost mountains, in order to make the new waterway ¨straight¨.  The ships passing through will be larger than the current ones...for technical updates and pictures, this link should give you exact information and graphs!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project

As announced, at 6am on Saturday morning, our new pilot,Franklin, arrived on board (on a tug boat)...he was coming from Panama city and had had a very early start! Heiner was in charge of breakfast and made enough pancakes to feed the hungry crew! We had Canadian maple syrup (brought along in our luggage) and even our pilot seemed to find the apple pancake - maple syrup combination delicious! Caribbean people love sweets! Pancakes were a hit!

We had a 4 hour long trip on the Gatun lake before coming to the Pedro Miguel and the Miraflores locks. Lots of time to sip our coffee admiring the landscapes and listening to our pilot who was very knowledgeable about the expansion of the canal and the ensuing ecological challenges!

AIS map showing an amazing amount of boat traffic in the canal...as expected!

 There was a lot of light entering the locks...one large ship and a tug ..as for us, we had to tie up to a large trimaran! Not an easy task in the dark, blended by lights. Our pilot, Ricky, was very relax but the trimaran pilot was a nervous type...anyhow, Heiner and Stephen (our fourth line handler) manage to untie ropes, and got rapidly familiar with the routine.While Heiner has done a lot of locks, this was different: the lines were thrown from a very high with a monkey fist wall by two canal employees: the line handlers had to tie our lines to it so the employes could retrieve them and attach them to the posts.  Our boats were so to say floating between the lock walls while the water was coming up at quite a speed!

 It was about 23h30 when we got to our anchorage at Lake Gatun...well, rather than anchoring, we tied up to a very large buoy together with the trimaran. After a very late supper (!), all went to bed! Next morning, the pilot was scheduled for 6am...

 Before leaving the Chagres, we took advantage of its quiet waters to transfer SuAn's name made of vinyl lettering onto the hull..a difficult job for Gabi and Heiner as some of the lettering were almost 10 years old!!! But the result was great! It was important to affix the boat's name on the hull so that the Canal Pilots would be able to spot it easily!

That evening, back in Colon, the preparation for the transit continued with Gabi and Lutz looking for a fourth line handler and working at updating their blog to inform their friends and relatives about the schedule of the canal transit. Heiner and Marleyne went shopping: we were going to have an extra crew member for the next 36 hours as well as 2 pilots ( a different one each day) who would take their meals with us!  Lutz has hired an agent - Eric - for managing the Canal transit; this agent was looking after getting us tires and lines as well as the coordination of pilots. That same evening, we were to go anchor at the flats where a pilot would board our boat to commence the first stretch of the Canal.

After the forest exploration, we made it to the dam by dinghy...the Gatun Dam..an amazing piece of engineering! We took the opportunity to walk up to the Gatun locks...to put us in the mood for our upcoming canal transit! Of course, we could not resist buying hellado from a street vendor: although we wished for different flavours, we all got vanilla! ...must be because of Marleyne's Spanish speaking skills!

While the night itself was wonderfully calm, the howler monkeys had a strong presence at sunset and in the early morning hours! As for the crocodiles which were supposed to inhabit the river, we did not see any: not even at night when we tried to spot them with the flashlight! After seeing several men snorkeling looking for lobsters, we decided that crocodiles were definitely not a threat and enjoyed an early morning swim before Heiner's pancakes breakfast (or was it Lutz pancakes that morning?)...

After breakfast, we motored further along the beautiful river. 


We anchored the boat not too far away from the dam.  We found a wooden dock along the bank and followed a path in the jungle trying to locate the howler monkeys who were very loud that morning although it was 10am!  As soon as our presence was felt, there was silence! But they were there, surrounding us! and spying on us from the highest branches!!! We spent quite a bit of time standing there...feeling like in a National Geographic documentary!

We then continued on the same path and witnessed capuchin monkeys pursuing squirrels in very high trees. Capuchin monkeys are omnivorous! For a moment, I dreamed of importing some to Kingston so they could scare away our numerous black squirrels...but I decided not to...just because ..our squirrels are too large!

And then there were leaf cutting ants`driving on a path parallel to ours...see video clip

Time passed by so quickly: one could have stayed forever in this forest just observing and relishing the tropical experience!

Fuerte San Lorenzo is the landmark at the very entrance of the Rio Chagres. We did not have the opportunity to visit it but the following web site has more pictures of the fort http://www.galenfrysinger.com/panama_fort_san_lorenzo.htm. 

We motored for at least one hour admiring the tropical forest and looing for the best anchoring spot from where we could do some explorations. We read in our cruising guide that there were paths in the forests and that it was also possible to sail up the Lake Gatun damm.

Our first incursion in the dense vegetation of the forest was somewhat magical: trees were very high forming a green dome overhead, with many butterflies fluttering around us when Heiner spotted the large blue morpho!