Skyelark of London - Through the panama

The Panama Canal is truly impressive – it doesn’t matter how many times you pass through it, you can’t help be impressed about the scale of it all. The real wonder that someone took on such a monumental project - chiselling miles of channel through the mountains, flooding 120 square miles of rainforest and farm land not to mention the scale of the engineering required to build the locks, the ‘diplomacy’ of creating a new country, the five hundred million dollars spent (in 1903) and the 20,000 lost lives - all for a 99 year lease. But it’s been a massive success, a gold mine for the Americans who operated it for 100 years and now provides the main source of wealth to Panama. The trick is in the pricing. The Canal authority take into account a vessel’s start and end point, then calculate the distance it will save by the reduced fuel bill, days at sea, insurance risk etc. With a monopoly on the short cut, they just need to be cheaper and more convenient than the alternative, so a container ship can pay around $1 million and 40 ships can get through in a day.

The cost of Skyelark was not so much, a paltry $2k. It’s surprising they waste their time for us at all...I think the long way round the cape would have cost us a little more, although it is on the agenda at some point.

We had a fairly eventful transit – there were some canal union issues that meant we didn’t have enough line handlers on the shore in some of the locks. Usually the yachts go into the locks in ‘nests’ of 3 boats, each side boat has 2 lines to the shore and these are adjusted to keep the boats in the centre of the chamber. Because of the lack of staff we had to tie the whole raft against one of the lock walls, which isn’t ideal for the inside boat with so much turbulence and weight against it. Happily this wasn’t us, but the inside boats got pretty beaten up, and there was a fair amount of cursing to the Canal and our agents for allowing it to happen. Still it was good fun and an amazing spectacle.