Well, Sound Effect is now officially scheduled for an Oct 10 transit of the Canal. I must say this is a pretty large check mark for the bucket list to captain my on boat through the canal.
Anyone wanting to fly down and hold a line on deck is welcome, you have one month to figure out how to get here. First come first served.
I recommend pancanal.com website for those interested in history, how it works, and web cams of the actual locks. Bookmark the site and click on beginning about 9am Oct 10 to see Sound Effect and Kokomo. Another idea is to click on the last position for Sound effect on this blog and widen the shot you should see the start of the canal. (we are that close). You can than create your own trip through the canal.

For those of you coming some day in your own boat the process has been painless.
1. On the Balboa side go to Building 729 to the admeasurer office (you can tell the taxi “edificio 729) and pick up information, fill out a brief form , and make an appointment to get measured
2. Our appointment was for the next morning so we upped anchor and steamed out to the area designated and were met immediately by a pilot boat which dropped off our own canal official.
He measured the boat asked a few simple questions, we signed some forms and he killed the rest of the time with stories and jokes. Piece of cake.
3. Pay for the privilege. There is only one bank on each side. In Balboa Citi bank in Nikkos plaza accepted my $1500 in cash. It must be cash as of now. We will get a little more than half back if we don’t break the canal.
4. The next day we called the canal office (number is on information picked up in #1 above)and scheduled an appointment. We asked for a specific date one month out so we can transit with Kokomo.
All of the above can be done by an agent for a fee but why?. The last item remaining is fenders and lines that must be rented. We plan to rent them from a taxi and negotiate for a return trip for our line handlers.

Today we changed the oil in the engine and transmission and bought fuel for a trip to the local Las Perlas Islands. We will be away from internet and my editor had a baby Monday so I may or may not get a blog posted for a while.