Home » Panama » DYED IN THE WOOL - AND THE 15 CAN TRANSIT…

Or is that……died in the wool…..some kinky kiwi sexual asphyxiation fetish….and what inspired that thought?…..I'm just recovering from the 15 can transit, yes, I’ve pulled it off, right thru’ the far canal in a yacht!

Where were we?…..I think leaving Bogota was last up, I’m still trying to summarise the last 6 months in south America, so hard to get my thoughts aligned, so much was there.

DYED IN THE WOOL - AND THE 15 CAN TRANSIT…

Bill Shum
2006-08-21 17:16:49

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corners, as the water rises and falls……the locks, 3 up, then across the great lake, 3 down…..everyone’s getting excited, our other line handlers turn up, I’m nervously re-checking the beer, a baby coffin with about 6 dozen cans of Panama and 2 huge bags of ice, they’ve chilled beautifully. Andy has left his wife and kid on their boat so he can do the transit and Rae and Sharon off Mustang Sally join us….good crew!

Around 8am the pilot gets dropped off, nice guy, we relax, lots of horror stories about crap pilots abound, we head off towards the bridge of the Americas, impressive,
another yacht is going thru’ with us, Gimme Shelter, americanos, its been huge, the last few days, being back in the company of yachties, a whole ‘nother world, like the back-packers and the bikes, parallel universes, I am very fortunate to have made the cultural cross-over even if the language is often more obscure than if they’d been speaking espanol!

We pass under the bridge, dinky toy cars and trucks crawling across, hundreds of feet above us, we are hooting and shouting, this is really IT, we’re in the canal….taking turns and exchanging cameras to record every step along the way!

Looming up behind us, and then passing us, the mother of all walls of steel, massive just doesn’t do it justice, this fcuker blocks out the sun, apparently holding 3,000 cars, yes, you read it right, 3,000! And a crew of 10!!….We catch up to it in the first lock, an hour or so up the canal, in fact, it’s our constant companion and we squeeze carefully in behind it at the first 3 locks. Like most ships its dimensions are panamax, made to measure for the canal, there is bugger-all room to spare, looks like about a foot on each side, it takes a few minutes to get it into the pod, guys with Vaseline lubricate the walls as it slips in (well, I could imagine it), little trains, run along tracks on the dockside, cables ...