TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Despite the cloudy weather, we left Linton in high spirits at 5:45 am on Sunday morning (Nov 8^th).   There was quite a bit of rain when we were north of the entrance to Colón harbor so we did not see all the ships at anchor waiting to go through The Canal. 

After another day and a night of motoring into the light headwind, we were only 45 nm from the entrance to Bocas del Toro by 7 am on Monday and we were confident about arriving at the anchorage before dark.  But just as we were switching from my watch to Randall’s the engine suddenly stopped.  No coughing or long slow-down, the revs just dropped and the engine ceased.  The water temperature was fine so we got out the dip-stick to measure the fuel level and to our great surprise found that it was down to 1 inch depth of diesel whereas by my calculations we had expected 6 or 7 inches (a full tank is 36 inches) and hence there should have been enough fuel (just) to finish the journey.  During the night it had been necessary to increase the engine RPMs as we were fighting a 2 – 3 knot head current but there was no good explanation as to why the fuel consumption rate had been so unexpectedly and unusually high.

Anyway, solving that problem would have to wait as the immediate concern was making it to our destination before we started to drift back too far.  We had 5 gallons of diesel in our jerry can but we realized that it would not be enough to get us to the entrance at Bocas against the current and leave us some fuel to get to the anchorage (especially if the fuel consumption rate continued to be high).  So we raised the sails and started to tack into the wind.  This would have been a fine plan had there been more wind or less current but after five hours we had sailed a long way north and south but were two miles further away from our destination.  So we evaluated the options of continuing to tack back and forth or finding somewhere to anchor along the coast and hoping that the wind would pick up or change to a more favorable direction.  But without an accurate weather forecast for the area we decided that this plan was too uncertain so we turned Tregoning downwind and sailed towards Colón to fill-up with diesel at Shelter Bay marina.

We should have been able to make it comfortably to Colón (95 nm) by the next morning but the weather did not cooperate.  First, at 1am we had to endure a very nasty thunderstorm that we watched approaching on the radar but could not avoid.  The wind was not too fierce (we had one reef in the mainsail) but there was torrential rain and a horrible amount of close lightning.  One cloud to cloud flash above us changed the scale on the radar as Randall was watching it which was rather spooky and another cloud to sea strike was close enough that the thunder was only one second behind the flash.  We were convinced that we would be struck before we could get away from the storm but somehow we were lucky and although storm cells moved around us all morning at least the lightning subsided.  By mid-morning Tuesday the wind was dropping and our speed under sail kept decreasing such that it would be dark before we could make it to the Río Chagres or Colón.  So we fired up the engine and hoped that my conservative estimation of how long our five gallons would last us would be correct.  We phoned Shelter Bay marina to find out that their fuel service was closed that day because it was the Patriots’ Day holiday in Panama but they did have a slip available for the night.  We could have anchored in the Río Chagres for free but at that point a quiet night in the marina seemed rather attractive, especially as we would not have to worry about whether we had enough fuel to get in and out of the river and into the marina. 

When we were within 10 nm of the harbor entrance we called Cristóbal Control to ask permission to enter the busy Colón harbor and they told us to check back when we were within a mile of the breakwater.  As we approached we watched a US Navy warship come in to anchor near the breakwater and noted the intervals between several ships leaving the harbor after transiting The Canal.  We were given permission to enter as long as we did not interfere with shipping and with great relief we pulled into a slip at the marina at 3pm, just an hour before the office closed for the holiday.  Thankfully, their restaurant was open and after 57 hours of hand-steering with no hot food we thoroughly enjoyed our meal and a good night’s sleep.