We have made it to the Pacific!! What a trip. It started in Colon waiting at the anchorage in front of Club Nautico. We had our schedule set the day before. We needed to be in the Flats anchorage by 5PM to pick up our advisor and then into the canal for 7PM Great, David from Sueno came at noon and we got him on board. We had our tires set up and we had picked up our lines the night before. We hired two line handlers from Tito, one was his son Marcos and I think the other was one of Marcos' friends. We picked them up at 3PM. As we were hauling the dinghy on deck Marcos got a phone call from his father to say that our time had been changed and our advisor was waiting for us in the Flats. Oh Oh, now we were late. We had been rescheduled to go thru with a pack of Oysters. There is a big Oyster rally and a bunch of them are sailing around the world together. We called and said we would be there as quick as possible, about 40 minutes. We made it in about 25. We were afraid that if they left without us we would be rescheduled. We would have been fined about $400.00US. Thankfully we made it. We didn't even drop the anchor to get our advisor on, they pulled up, he jumped and we punched it to the canal. So much for serving dinner before we got there. We were in the nick of time and pulled up to raft up with an Oyster 46 named Yaltina. They were a British flagged boat and snotty as hell. The captain was all freaked out because we had tires on our boat as fenders. Our tires were wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and he had out a cloth to keep his boat from getting marked. (most of the boats use tires in the canal but I guess Oyster people are above that). He was yelling orders at everybody and even his own crew were giving him grief. It was brilliant when after about 2 minutes of his nonsense his advisor looked at him and told him that our advisor was in charge of the raft and that he needed to listen to him. Our advisor, Ivan, was really nice, calm, cool and collected. He even let Zack blow his conch horn to signal when we were ready for lines to be dropped.

We got tied up and headed for the canal opening, tied together. We moved into the first lock. The guys on top of the locks throw down lines and you are supposed to tie the line to your 125' line and they pull it up and tie you to the sides of the locks. You control the boats by tightening and loosening the line on your end. His crew missed the line that was thrown to them. We had our 2 professional line handlers and it was very clear who was doing the better job. We were in charge of the raft from there forward. This didn't seem to make their captain, Ian, all that happy. That and we had chips, fruit, and homemade cookies and all they had were bad moods. The 3 locks went perfectly smooth and we had an uneventful lockage. We came out and headed for a cheesewheel, this is a donut buoy that you tie up to for the night. Our advisor left but the line handlers stay the night. The advisor said that another advisor would arrive at 5:45AM to finish the transit with us. We had some wine, ate a nice dinner and went to bed.

Our new advisor, Jose, showed up at about 6:15, we shoved off and started driving across the Gatun Lake. We had breakfast on the way. The lake is huge and it takes about 5 hours to cross to the Miraflores Locks. The lake is beautiful and we heard that when the US owned the Canal boats could transit the first set of locks and then stay in the lake for a while before transiting to the Pacific. There was even a yacht club/marina in the lake. It was nice but we had to motor and at one point Zack was below with the line handlers watching movies on his dvd player, it was cute. We were traveling with a pack of the Oyster rally boats. We hung back because we had a lock time and there was really no point in getting there too early. We had 11 boats in our lock group. We all got there early and we were put into the locks a little early. All the boats ahead of us had already rafted together and so we rafted with the last boat of the group. They were a little less snotty, but still "Oyster People" - it was another Oyster 47. As we finished tying up and our advisor got a call that this fairly large tour cat was going to tie to our side and we would go thru as a raft of three, except that the cat was going to go sidewall. The cat had a pilot on board, who is supposed to be highly trained. They flew by us and the boat we were tied to creating a large wake. The boats started lifting in the wake and crashing down. We were afraid that our aft cleat was going to pop and then we heard a loud pop sound, the fairlead on the aluminum toerail of the other boat broke off and the next minute the dock line tying the two sterns together snapped. Shit! We got a next dockline on and fended the boats apart until the wake calmed down. It was pretty harrowing for a few minutes. Even our advisor was upset. There was really no reason for that to happen. As we were tying up to this boat, which had about 20 feet of freeboard we were pretty stressed out, they had a metal rub rail which just missed the tops of our stanchions. They also used all but one of their fenders to keep themselves off of the sidewall and provided one to keep themselves off of us. We were thankful that we had rented double tires. Thank you Taking Flight for that tidbit of info. Our advisor got on the phone with the control tower and made it clear that the cat had caused damage to the boat, not ours, but that we did not want to tie to them again. It was sketchy for a while but thankfully we did not have to continue with them, They were sent ahead to do the locks by themselves and we had to hold back and wait. Which was just fine with us. We were really thankful that we had Marcos on board. He has a ton of experience and he was even disobeying the advisor and doing what was best for our boat. The last 2 locks were uneventful and we pulled into the Pacific at about 12:30. We dropped off our line handlers and the advisor. We came around to the anchorage and did a fly by of Sueno and Mac Pelican with Zack blowing the conch horn and everyone cheering.