A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama

“Cruising,” as is known the life Amy and Mark lead, is the antithesis of scheduled.

But I’ve always subscribed wholeheartedly to the theory that I’d rather regret doing something than regret not doing it. So I met up with my sister Julie, my brother-in-law Casey, and headed to the Panama Canal.

Amy and Mark’s emailed plea was for three more adults to join them through the canal as “line handlers.” Mark’s mother, Kay, had already volunteered and had arrived in Panama City a day earlier.

Our job description, in a nutshell, was to ensure that the rope on our side of the boat remained equally taut as the rope on the other side of the boat so the vessel wouldn’t bang against either wall of the canal. There’s more to it than that. But I learned that the more I read about transiting the canal made me more nervous. Sometimes the less you know, the better. One Web site pointed out that novices serve as line handlers all the time. Most important, the site said, is an ability to take direction well and keep your wits about you. Okey-dokey.

The night before our 7:30 a.m. scheduled transit, Mark gave us a better run-down of what to expect. We got a good idea of what to do as line handlers, as well as a sense for all the little things Mark and Amy still needed to do before morning.

For instance, they had to deal with the dinghy. The dinghy is this little bathtub-sized inflatable boat with a lawnmower motor that takes them from the anchored sailboat to shore. It’s maybe six feet wide, and Amy and Mark are masters at using every inch of its space. I watched them load 10 full grocery bags, then decide to add two 10-pound bags of ice. And that was before Robert, Mark, Amy, and I got on.

I thought for sure the little boat would sink. I’d think that a couple more times over the weekend, so I guess it was good practice.

The dinghy’s home is on the back of the boat, making the boat six feet longer, and sending the boat over some magical tipping point of 50 feet in length and the amount they’re charged to go through the Panama Canal. The dinghy would need to be moved onto the boat. In some out-of-the-way place where it wouldn’t get stepped on and where it wouldn’t add to the sailboat’s 48 feet length.

I’d love to say I stayed up to help, as my crew member title would imply. But I slept. It was, after all, 11:30 or later. In my day, that’s late. In Mark and Amy’s, well, they were just beginning. I listened vaguely as the winches groaned to pull up the dinghy onto the boat. I could have easily been listening to the waves lapping against the boat. I slept on.

The next morning we awoke to rain. Not much rain, but enough to make this novice line handler more nervous about the day ahead. We headed to our assigned buoy, where we’d be picking up our “advisor.” The Panama Canal authority requires that every vessel have either a pilot (for the big tankers) or an advisor (for us small fry). Oscar was a delight. Mark was sure that he hadn’t been “advising” for long. But he’d been through the canal more than once, which was all I cared about.

As it turned out, we were to be tethered to another boat. In order to get the most boats through the canal as efficiently as possible, they often tether some of the smaller boats together to fill the width of the canal. We now only needed two line handlers instead of four, since only our starboard side was exposed to the side of the canal.

The boat we were now closely tied to held an American family headed for Florida. They’d just spent three years in Costa Rica. I felt pretty good about this fact because it made Mark and Amy’s two-and-a-half year sail down the North American continent seem a little less, well, unusual.

And this is the third ship with which we share the lock. Oscar assures us it’s a “small boat” and presents no problem. Maybe. But our little sailboat doesn’t have staircases.

So here’s how this line stuff works. A man throws onto your boat a smallish rope with a ball, called a monkey ball, tied onto the end.

You take that monkey ball and tie it to your rope, which is cinched through a cleat. The man is still holding his end of the rope, pulling you well into the lock before he ties his end onto a really large concrete post.

Once you’re into the lock, jammed with as many other boats as can fit, the locks close.

Now the lock will be pumped with unimaginable amounts of water, raising the boats 40 feet. The undercurrents created from this huge influx of water, apparently, are powerful. One guidebook advises you not to jump in for any reason. Not a problem.

The photo above shows you the seriousness of the job. Casey has his line securely fastened to the winch to keep it taut at all times. Robert is doing his Three Stooges routine. And the party lights hanging from the umbrella are illuminated at night for full effect.

The Panama Canal is divided up into three locks, then one large lake, then three more locks. Traveling south to north, or from the Pacific to the Atlantic as we were, you’ll be raised 85 feet above sea level over the course of the first three locks. You’ll then kick back and motor through the Gatun Lake for 23 miles, or about three hours. Gatun Lake is a manmade lake, formed by the construction of the Gatun Dam. A hundred years later you can still see massive tree stumps poking up throughout the lake. And lots of cocodrilos, or crocodiles.

I learned as we approached the second set of three locks late in the afternoon that we were the last boat to make the entry to the Atlantic. Had we not made it, we would have had to spend the night in crocodile-infested Gatun Lake and pay another several hundred dollars in transit fees. Instead, we had Rickmers to contend with.

Amy and I had joked as we approached the locks that at least we wouldn’t be tethered to a boat the size of the one we’d just passed. Heh heh. We’d breezed past an enormous oil tanker from Antwerp called Rickmers, even getting our picture taken with it in the background to show its enormity. She and I stopped chuckling when Rickmers entered our lock, directly behind us.

 I don’t care how slowly an oil tanker is going. When it’s coming toward you in your little 46-foot sailboat, it looks like it’s going way too fast. And it surely won’t be able to screech to a halt before pounding into you.

For some reason, I was totally unnerved by this tanker sharing the last three locks with us. But we made it through. The bonus of being the last boat through is that all the tugboats, too, are headed to the other side. The hundreds of tankers lined up in Limon Bay of the Atlantic Ocean will need these tugboats to help them through their passage to the Pacific’s Bay of Panama.

We were lucky enough to be tethered to a tugboat through the last three locks, ending our tenure as line handlers on the Panama Canal. To give you an idea of the unsinkability and durability of the tugboats, their crew is required to wear hardhats, not life jackets. When Robert saw the guys in the orange hardhats, he grabbed his and wore it the rest of the journey.

Three locks and 85 descending feet after we’d traveled through Gatun Lake, we were dumped out into Limon Bay. The sun was setting. We had to find the tugboat that would take Oscar the advisor back to shore. And there were countless tankers lined up for their passage to the Pacific.

After seeing Oscar off, our next task was to wind through this line of tankers to get to our ultimate destination, the Shelter Bay Marina. Mark had never been there; the office was closed for the day and unable to give us guidance. So we bobbed and weaved our way among these behemoths, slowly finding our way.

We found in the dark an empty slip at the marina, docked, and hit the hay.

The next morning we explored around the marina. The Shelter Bay Marina used to house Fort Sherman, a former U.S. military base that, among other duties, trained soldiers in jungle survival techniques. Where it’s not surrounded by water, it’s surrounded by tropical forest.

The jungles surrounding the Shelter Bay Marina were my introduction to the sounds of howler monkeys. These little monkeys, which are not much bigger than a squirrel, have the most amazingly ferocious call, hence their name. When Julie went out running early one morning, she said she was sure she heard gorillas in the jungle.

The area around the marina was notable, too, for the number of crabs crawling the roads. One afternoon after a brief cloudburst we saw a truck full of workers heading home stop their pickup, jump out and grab as many crabs as would fit in their backpacks, then move on. We were told they’d either eat these crabs themselves or sell them.

After 24 hours at the marina, it was time for three of us line handlers to head back to the States. Our flight was to leave early in the morning, so we decided to take a cab the night before and stay in an airport hotel. As it turned out, this three-hour cab ride was more harrowing than the trip through the Panama Canal. One Web site said there were a thousand things that could go dangerously wrong transiting the canal. If this is true, there were a thousand and one things that could go wrong on the highway from Colon to Panama City.

Our cab driver picked us up around 9 p.m. with a machete in the back of his car. He explained the machete was for the banditos one could encounter on the highway. The headlights on his circa 1980s Toyota were out of whack, allowing us a much better view of the treetops than the pitch black route ahead of us.

Much of the local highway was under construction, with a drop-off from the highway of several feet. One quick swerve to avoid any of the numerous potholes or swerving cars, and we would have been history.

We made it to the area of the Panama City airport, with nerves rattled but otherwise unscathed. When I mentioned to Amy in an email the treacherous highway trip, here’s her reply:

“We are now used to the conditions, and rather than being appalled at the unsafe ditches by the side of the road, we are pretty excited to see that they are working on the road and that it is asphalt rather than dirt! And, as for the police blockades, we're typically glad to see police out and about.”

Amy’s an intrepid traveler! And a wonderful hostess. The three days on the boat in Panama were unforgettable—and a welcome glimpse into her daily life.

Sometimes when I tell people that my little sister has been sailing for two and a half years around the continent with her husband and 3-year-old son, they look at me like it’s a little bit weird.

After leaving Panama, though, I realized that Mark and Amy look at my life—scheduled to the hour, suburban, predictable—like it’s a little bit weird.