wednesday may 21, 2008 (colon, panama)

Never in our brief and limited exposure to this world have we found a city so aptly named. Thus begins our 21^st day of canal induced captivity in the Panamanian city of Colon.

It’s hot. A sticky, pungent, and clammy hot. Only once in the past weeks have we witnessed the temperature fall below 30 degrees. It’s rainy season now, and much like the city, the season has also been named accurately. It rains daily, as much as 6 inches at a time. The rain does nothing to lower the temperature, and raises the already suffocating humidity level. Of course you are forced to close all the windows and hatches on the boat when it rains so that’s when you can catch us at our most miserable; locked up inside our steam bath of a boat watching the walls mold while we squabble over anything and everything.

Here’s a few choice paragraphs about the place we pulled from a newspaper article:

“COLON, Panama: In the slum city of Colon in central Panama, children run barefoot through decaying tenement blocks as sewage wells up through the streets. Colon, at the mouth of the Panama Canal on the Caribbean coast about 50 miles northwest of Panama City, has a split personality - one poor and abandoned, the other a prosperous player in the world economy. Colon’s plight is unique in Panama. Its free trade zone has attracted more foreign investment than any other place in Panama in recent years, but no other city has such extreme urban poverty.

Everyone acknowledges regenerating Colon is a huge undertaking. Colon’s local council estimates at least $50 million is needed to put up thousands of new homes, lay a completely fresh sewage system and build new roads. The government’s first step has been to declare Colon a social disaster area.

In the city’s centre, people live in urban poverty as extreme as any in Latin America. Excrement fills some streets because few houses have sanitation systems, while the majority of buildings, many inhabited, are on the point of collapse. Unemployment stands at 40 percent, and weekly murders in the city of 200,000 people make Colon Panama’s most dangerous place.
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Despite the new project and government pledges to improve the plight of the poor, Colon’s residents remain pessimistic. “I don’t think there’s any genuine hope for us, not in this world at least,” said Jose Luis Rosario, a local street tailor mending a shirt under an umbrella in the rain. —Reuters”

Nice huh? To be fair, there’s a certain charm to the place. We are anchored in the throat (or the colon, depending on how you look at it) of the world’s most famous waterway. Our neighbors are a smattering of international sailboats and mega sized freighters from all over the world. The bar sells 4 different brands of Panamanian beer for a dollar a bottle. If you belly up for a few you may have a Columbian prostitute to your left waiting to see if you are paying with singles or twenties. To your right, 7 feet of muscle from Greenland involved in human trafficking. Far from being just products of my imagination these are a couple of the real life characters we’ve met that form the fabric of this seedy port town. Not the stuff of glossy tourist brochures, but welcome and interesting real world grit. The kind of place we expected to find on a trip like this.  It’s about as far away as you can get from the pet parade and beach church cruising lifestyle of the Bahamas.

When we aren’t collecting new friends from the criminal underworld or sweating out dollar beers faster than we can drink them, we are trying to find a new dinghy. Dinghies have few vital requirements but even the most difficult people would agree that keeping water out and air in are two of them. As previously described, ours has failed miserably on both counts. Miraculously the glue Jeff and I applied when we first arrived has been holding. Periodically Jaime and I reinforce the weld with a few more tubes of the industrial strength adhesive de jour; a ritual that has been getting us to and from shore safely. You would think a new dinghy would be easy to find here in Panama. After all, this is a key trading hub in the western Atlantic, a bottle neck for boats the world over. Not to mention the $10 billion-a-year free zone, a tax-free import and re-export centre run by immigrant entrepreneurs. Shouldn’t there be boating supplies, equipment and accessories of every make model and description to be found? Not the case. There seems to be only one or two places in the country that you can find a new dinghy, and they have either ‘just sold their last one’ or if you are lucky enough to find one, they want several thousand dollars for it. There is something completely wrong with paying $3995 for an 8 foot long inflatable dink though. We won’t do it on principle alone. I would rather buy 500 tubes of glue, fill a bathtub with it and just dip our leaking, nearly bottomless dinghy right in… hmm, not a bad idea.

So our transit date for the canal is May 28^th. It’s changed three times already though, so stay tuned. Getting that arranged was a cinch. Step one; hire a guy named Tito who does this for a living. We heard all kinds of opinions before we arrived about whether you should hire someone to help you or just do it all yourself. We hired a guy and I have to say it was the best 35 bucks ever spent. Tito has a gang working for him (which is almost literal; allegedly he takes these kids off the streets and gives them an alternative way to make a living). So Tito stays here at the marina and phones ahead to the various offices and agencies and tells them to expect us. Meanwhile I have a driver and a Spanish speaking rep whisk me all over town to get the necessary copies, clearances and stamps. We had business at immigration, the canal authority, and the boarding office. We collected a cruising permit, made copies of our passports for visa extensions which we then arranged at the visa office. I lost track of the number of forms and papers we went through, but with some help from Tito’s gang all I had to do was sign the bottoms of most of them so it wasn’t a big deal. And even better than that; because Tito was calling ahead and coordinating things with the driver we didn’t have to sweat it out in a single queue. That fact alone was worth the 35 bucks. We did all of this, had the necessary lines and fenders rented and were back at the marina within a couple of hours. So if you ask me about hiring someone to help, unless it’s the last 35 dollars to your name, do it.

The next day we had a guy named Carlos from the canal visit the boat to measure it up. He didn’t take his shoes off like the Cubans, but he was a friendly guy so we let it slide. His job was to check out the boat and make sure that it was canal worthy. He wanted to see that we had enough gas, took the measurements that our fee will be based on and stuff like that. When he was finished we received an official canal number, good for the life of the boat so if the slapdash ever goes through again they will have a record and she won’t need to be measured. We were slotted into the ‘less than 50 feet’ category so our transit toll is $500. There’s another $109 on top of that for the measurements and stuff and a refundable $891 security deposit. We also spent $135 on line and fender rentals, immigration, and Tito’s fee. So when we get the deposit back we are now into this canal transit thing for 744 smakaroos.

If you are reading this to prepare for your own canal transit, here are a few tips:

- Make sure to say your boat speed is at least 8 knots. They asked us 3 or 4 different times and if you slip up they will levy an additional $400 fee.

- You are required to have four 125 foot lines a minimum of 7/8ths diameter on board for the transit. No problem, you can rent these all over the place for 15 dollars a piece.

- To protect your boat you can supplement your fenders by renting tires wrapped up in plastic for 3 dollars each. Everyone uses them. We rented 10 which seems to be the average. They charge you a buck a piece to get rid of them once you are through, but you could also just give them to another boat waiting to transit the other direction if you wanted to save the 10 bucks and increase your boat karma.

- Put the security deposit on a credit card. If you pay cash it will take 4-6 weeks for them to process your refund and mail a cheque to your home address. With a credit card they just keep an imprint, same as renting a car. Oh, and MC is no good for this, the bank that keeps the deposit on behalf of the ACP will only accept a Visa or cash.

We have volunteered to line handle on a 46 foot catamaran. Every boat requires a professional pilot from the ACP (the canal company). You need to provide him with dinner, a bathroom and drinks, but his salary is paid for by the ACP. In addition, every boat must have 4 line handlers for the transit. They can be anyone but are not paid for by the ACP. The going rate to hire line handlers right now is $75 bucks a head (plus meals) so every time a small boat goes through they are looking for volunteers. Sometimes backpackers sign on to experience the canal from the inside or sometimes other boaters will volunteer as long as you will do the same for them in return. For us it will be a good opportunity to scope the whole thing out to get a little more familiar with the process before we take our own boat through. It will be my first time through and Jaime’s second. She already made the trip last week with another boat. We’ve read a bunch of canal related books (the best by far being David McCullough’s “The Path Between the Seas”) so while I’m pretty pumped to finally see it all in person, she gets to play the role of the cool veteran that’s already been there and done that.

We leave here on the boat tonight at about 8PM and go through first set of locks. We will anchor in Gatun Lake (the 85 foot canal summit) and stay overnight there. Tomorrow morning we descend 3 locks to the Pacific side and end up in Panama City sometime in the evening. We’ll probably take the opportunity to check out the Pacific side of the country while we are there. Maybe spend a day or two in Panama City and possibly sneak up the coast to a little surf village we want to check out called Santa Catalina. We still have a week to kill so why not try to make the most of it.

Almost forgot. We’ve had a bunch of requests to publish the poem referred to in Jeff’s April 29^th log. For the duration of that passage we each wrote 2 lines every time we were on watch. The paper is folded over so you can only see one line of the poem so you really have no idea what you are writing about. Just another stupid way to amuse ourselves during a long passage. For those who have requested and against our better judgment, you can check out our handiwork here: A Passage Poem

Since we’re linking to other pages, there’s a couple more you need to have a look at. If you haven’t noticed, the slapmap has been up and running since Cuba. It has our current location as well as the archives of our route taken all the way back to South Carolina. Big thanks to Pam who has been kindly administering this page for us from back home in Vancouver. You can use the navigation tab labeled slapmap at the top of the page or click here: The Slapmap

Last but not least, we finally have some videos posted from the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica and the passage here with Jeff. Click on a picture and it will show the video on you-tube. We will use you-tube to host all of our videos, they will be way easier for you to view that way. Navigate to the videos page from the “aboutslap” drop down tab or click here: Videos try not to let it go to our heads.

thursday may 22, 2008 (colon, panama)

Yep, still in Colon. A bit of sad news; only a couple of hours before we were scheduled to leave we learned that the captain of the boat we were going to be doing the line handling for had been mugged and stabbed three times with a twelve inch kitchen knife. He was with another guy and they were only a couple of blocks from the marina. A few minutes before it happened we were sitting around with them having a couple of beers talking about the trip. He’s now in the hospital here and is in rough shape but expected to recover completely. Most people have been waiting around here for weeks so you kind of get to know who’s who. Most of us have walked the same road so it really could have happened to anybody here which is probably part of the reason why people are pitching in to help out however they can. He´s a tough guy though, and if anybody can bounce back fom this it will be him.

Meanwhile Jaime has completely lost her mind. She has taken to eating lemon pie filling straight from the can and mutters incoherently while pacing back and forth across the boat. Not that I can blame her, the combination of heat and mind numbing repetition has us both feeling pretty cagey. You have to be careful about where you go and when so we end up spending way more time than we would like to at the marina. We haven’t been able to leave Colon because our transit date has been bouncing around. We wanted to be near the boat in case the opportunity to pass through early came up. So far we’ve only had false alarms that get our hopes up for nothing. Today our date has been moved again and we are now slotted for May 27^th. With our luck that will probably end up being exactly one day before the parts we ordered to fix the head arrive. We couldn’t find the parts we needed here so we had to order them from Miami. Funny thing is the air freight to Panama is actually half the price of what it would have been to have the part shipped to us in the Bahamas so as long as they make it in time it will work out pretty good. Just the thought of not having to wipe up pee out of the bilge anymore is now an almost inconceivable luxury that makes us giddy with excitement.

More big news, I’ve got a line on a dinghy. It’s only marginally less crappy then our Zodiac but at 200 bucks the price is right. I’ve already had a quick look and it’s actually a good brand name (Caribe) and is small and light enough to fit under our davits. If the holes are small enough to keep us from falling through the floor we’ll take it. Tomorrow I’m going to meet the guy to have a better look. We’ll inflate it and make sure the pieces are all there and if all goes well we’ll be the proud owners of two ragged shitty old dinghies. Maybe between the two of them and a few more tubes of adhesive we can make one that’s half way acceptable. We can call it a Carib-diac.

Glory be. A toilette that keeps the pee in and a dinghy that keeps the water out. We are moving up in the world but promise to try not to let it go to our heads.

tuesday may 27, 2008 (colon, panama)

Ah, such friutless optimism. Well there’s no toilette parts waiting here for us to pick up and mysteriously, the dinghy we had our eye on is no longer for sale. We will have to put our Carib-diac plans on hold for a little longer and I will have to make another trip to the hardware store today for more glue.

The big news today is that today IS the day. We are 8 hours, 47 minutes and 27 seconds (but who’s counting?) from blowing this popsicle stand. We have our fenders, our lines, and two out of the three requisite line handlers. Jaime has been busy organizing the boat for our guests, a big job which consists of rearranging the cabins, making sure we have enough bedding, stocking up on beer and junk food and a million other things. I’ll hit the marina in a few minutes to start looking for a third amigo to round off the crew.

It should go down like this; at noon today we call the signal station to confirm the arrival time for our pilot. At said time, probably between 5 and 8PM, a large diesel belching ACP pilot boat will come alongside the slapdash and drop him off. By that time we should have everything ready and waiting (fenders, lines, line handlers etc). Our pilot will coordinate things with the locks and the other boats that will be transiting with us. When everything is ready we up anchor and get underway.  Within an hour we should entering our first lock. From there we run the same itinerary that I outlined in the May 21^st update, meaning we overnight on Gatun Lake and transit the remaining locks early tomorrow morning.

Our level of involvement and activity for the transit will depend on how we are positioned with the other boats. We will be rafted up beside two other yachts so will either be sandwiched between two or outside on the right or left. If you are on the outside your line handlers will actually have some work to do. On one side you are managing the lines that reach up to the top of the locks. On the other side you are managing the lines that attach you to the other boats. If you happen to be the lucky boat in the middle you might need to contribute with a little forward or reverse action from the helm, but otherwise pretty much just sit around drink beer and make fun of the other people for having to work so hard.

There’s no way to say for sure exactly when we will be passing through but there’s a website with live feeds from cameras mounted in the locks. Here’s the link if you want to check it out.

http://www.pancanal.com/eng/photo/camera-java.html?cam=Expansion‏

I’ll try to convince everyone to moon the cameras or something so that you will know that it’s us. Actually if you do happen to hit it at the right time we should be easy to spot. We’re the only 3 sailboats transiting from the Atlantic to Pacific side tonight and tomorrow morning. So if you see a group of 3 sailboats all snuggled up side by side, one of them will be the slapdash, probably the smallest of the three. Panama time is the same as American & Canadian EST (which is 5 hours behind GMT) and they do not observe daylight savings time. We will pass through the Gatun locks late tonight, and the Pedro Miguez and Miraflores locks sometime tomorrow between 11AM and 2PM local time (best guess).

In other canal news the newest member of the BC Ferries fleet, the Coastal Renaissance, is finishing its trip across the Atlantic after being built in Germany. It isn’t too far behind us and should be pulling into Colon sometime in the next day or two for fuel. Who knows, maybe we will be passing through the canal together. I’m sure that the ACP won’t make them wait 28 days for a transit date. You can check out their progress here.

http://www.bcferries.com/about/super_c_tracker.html‏

It’s all done up with a 2010 Winter Olympics color scheme. None of this will mean much to you if you aren’t from, or at least familiar with our home province of British Columbia, but since that’s our hood so we think it would be cool to see the thing before everyone back home. One more ferry related point of interest, if you remember the German couple that we traveled around with for a few days back in Cuba (Tim and Stefy), they were naval engineers and worked for the company that built it. They told us about the construction, the funny politics of a German company building a Canadian boat (things like having to redesign all the propellar markings on the side because the Canadians thought that they looked too much like swastikas) and the upcoming Atlantic crossing. They even predicted that we might be here at the same time.

So in 36 hours we should have passed under the bridge of Americas and be resting soundly in Pacific waters. Strangely, we will also be even further east than we are right now. It’s true, grab your atlases kids. Most people think you just go from east to west through the canal but thanks to that funny little jog between the Americas we will actually be traveling southeast tonight.

We’re not sure if we’re more excited to pass through the Panama Canal, a big trip highlight we’ve been waiting for, or just to be leaving Colon without any bullet holes or stab wounds. In any case it’s time for us to dress the slapdash up with our best black rubber bling for her big date tonight, and go shanghai us another line handler.

It was a dark and stormy night…

If you happened to be at the Panama Canal Yacht Club (the ‘PCYC’ to us canal refugees) at 5PM on Wednesday May 27^th there’s a good chance that you may be a prostitute. There’s also a good chance that you would have seen a rather nervous looking Canadian guy dividing his time between looking at the clock in the bar and frequent trips to the payphone. Our canal pilot had confirmed his arrival for 5:30PM and instead of being on the boat where I should have been at this late hour I was at the yacht club helplessly trying to will our line handlers into walking around the corner.

A couple of hours ago things were looking pretty good. Everything was in place and Jaime and I were on our way back to the boat. The plan was to drop Jaime off so that she could get everything ready on board for our guests and I would zip back and pick up our crew. Then it started raining. I know, every time someone comes back from the tropics they tell you about how hard it rained at some point. We’ve all heard the same story. Not to sound too cliché, but this really was different. The sky turned black and the heavens commenced to deposit a solid sheet of water down on us that sounded like a cross between a forest fire and a million galloping horses. This side of Panama sees 2 and a half meters of rain per year, a significant amount by any standard, and tonight we must have seen 20 centimeters of that annual average. We were hopelessly trapped on the boat. Not because I was afraid of getting a little wet. No, this was a whole different thing. This rain actually hurt, it felt more like hail. Try opening your eyes the next time you have a shower. You know that layer of water that builds up over your eyes and forces you to keep them shut or blink repeatedly? Same thing. Looking out of the boat was like looking out the window of your car while you are going through a drive-through car wash (less suds though). After an hour or so it eased off and became a mere torrential down pour so I seized the opportunity and started bailing out the 6-8 inches of water that had collected in the dinghy, which for a change could not be blamed on the leaky hull.

I soon found Danny who would be coming along with us for the transit. He said that he knew another person that could round off the crew for us and left to go pick him up. Too easy. That was at about a quarter past four. Should have never let him leave because now we were short two crew. I asked Jan, a nice lady at the dock who is in the process of single handing her way through a circumnavigation, if I could use her VHF to update Jaime back on the boat. She obliged and overheard our conversation and said not to worry, that if we were short that she would not stand by and see us miss the time slot that we had waited a month for. I was blown away by the offer. Who volunteers for a two day trip in this miserable weather with 20 minutes notice? I thanked her but said that I was sure that Danny would be along any minute with our last crew member. I was probably trying to convince myself more than anything though.

Assuming it would take 15 minutes to get back to the boat I had another 10 minutes to spare. So I sweated it out, what choice did I have really, but still no Danny. Now we were 2 line handlers short 15 minutes before the non refundable time slot that we had waited 28 days for in this hell hole. I had no choice but to go back to Jan and ask if I could take her up on the offer. She didn’t hesitate and told me that she would have her things together by the time I could get over to her boat with my dinghy. A plan was forming; if we could close up the front cabin and convince the ACP pilot that the 4^th line handler was present but sick in bed with some rare and highly contagious tropical malady then maybe just maybe… and while I was scheming and untying the dinghy who but Danny himself hopped out of a cab with his back pack and started running towards me. He was alone so we picked up Jan and headed for Salsa. Salsa’s Captain is another single hander. His name is Kirk and he had volunteered a few days in advance. Kirk wasn’t one to be deterred by a little spattering of rain so a few minutes later Jaime watched a full crew in a leaky dink pull up to the slapdash.

The pilot was right on time and it wasn’t long before we were pulling up the anchor and heading for our first set of locks. We had a great group; Danny the local tattoo artist, Jan the adventurer who regaled us with tales of her engineless arrival in Alaska, and Kirk the hard working smart ass who drank all my beer and stole my sunglasses. If he wasn’t trying to spoon me he was hitting on Jaime. Our kind of people.

Pretty soon we were rafted up beside Blue Jay and Orbit. These were two 45 foot plus mono hulls that had the combined effect of making the slapdash look tiny. We met the Blue Jay crew way back in Cuba. We actually had a slip beside them in the Bahia de Vita so it was pretty cool to be tied up along side them now, a thousand miles or so later, about to go through the Panama Canal.

It was a bit nerve wracking at first. We followed a freighter in, and watching those massive steel doors shut behind you is a tad intimidating. To top it all off you are handcuffed to two other boats so are at the mercy of others and not at all in control of your own fate. It didn’t take long to get used to the whole program though and the trip is actually a piece of cake. You have to be alert, but there really isn’t all that much work to do so there’s plenty of time to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Back in the 1880’s the French took the first kick at the canal. They eventually failed though and the massive project was finally completed over 30 years later by the US in 1914. It’s reported that by the time the canal was completed over 27 thousand workers were dead, but in actual fact they really have no idea what the real number is since the deaths of most Black, Chinese and West Indian labor weren’t even recorded. At one point the death toll was so high that disposing of the bodies became a primary issue. They even began pickling the bodies in barrels and transporting them to medical research facilities and universities.

Panamax is the name given to the largest ships that can use the canal today. We passed one during our transit; it’s the photo of the tug pushing a ship with containers stacked seven high. These massive ships are designed and built to fit the locks with a few feet to spare. To give you a sense of scale, our boat would nearly fit into one of those containers. So if each one was a slapdash you could fit 76 of us that back row alone.