Cruiser Convergence

There’s no place on earth where more vessels converge than at the Panama Canal. For the past 100 years, ships carrying all sorts of cargo as well as voyaging sailboats and powerboats of all descriptions have passed through this 41-mile transcontinental ‘ditch’. In fact, it’s been in operation so long that most owners of the 700+ cruising boats that transit the Canal each year undoubtedly take it for granted.

Truth is, though, that having to deal with various types of ‘pleasure craft’ — some less than 30 feet long — is a daily annoyance for the Panama Canal Authority. But luckily for globetrotting sailors, the requirement to accept them was codified by the 1977 treaty with the U.S. Needless to say, without that agreement, long-established patterns of world cruising would be radically different.

Over the past seven years we’ve had the pleasure of meeting hundreds of world cruisers just before or just after they passed through the ditch on their way to the South Pacific at our annual Pacific Puddle Jump Sendoff Parties. We held one at each end of the Canal this year, the first last Wednesday at the Balboa Yacht Club (on the Pacific side), and the second on Saturday at the Shelter Bay Marina (on the Caribbean side). As always, every sailor we met seemed thrilled to be on the verge of jumping off for exotic landfalls in French Polynesia — with many planning to make a pit stop in the Galapagos Islands en route.

Among the dozens of sailors we met, some had bought their boats less than a year ago in the Med, the Caribbean or somewhere on the East Coast of the U.S., others had been out cruising for years, and a few were on their second lap around the planet. Look for photos and mini-profiles of them all in an upcoming edition of Latitude 38.