Panama Canal Transit
09 March 2012
Alex, from Centenarios (we highly would recommend him) was our agent in organizing everything for our transit, At 1:30, we left the docks of Shelter Bay, with our new crew who will be joining us across the Atlantic. (They live in Panama, and offered to help us with the lines, which was great to have them and meet them.) By 2:30 we were on our way towards our first docks.
The first part of the canal, is up three docks taking you into one of the largest man made damned lakes. After about 20nm you enter the hardest part of the building of the canal, which is cutting a canal through solid granite, and down the 3 locks. Its an amazing engineering project, which has been operating now 24/7 for the last 100 years, with not a day of closure!
This video released by PBS is really interesting and worth watching.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/panama/
8 hours later, 6 locks later, a delicious lasagna, and a meeting of new friends as we experienced the passage, we arrived on the Pacific side! You immediately could feel a difference in the air, and the sea temperature went from 25 to 17.5 degrees and a tidal difference of 3-4 mt.!