St Lucia to Panama

A trip from St Lucia, via Colombia and the Panama Canal, to the Pacific

My friends Graham and Kate left Scotland on their Ovni 395, Barracuda of Islay, in 2017.  They sailed down to the Azores, crossing with ARC during winter 2017/2018.  (The World Cruising Club organises lots of different rallies, with the ARC across the Atlantic to the Caribbean being the most popular.)  After finishing in St Lucia, they sailed on up through the Caribbean and the east coast of the USA before lifting the boat out for the hurricane season in mid-May in Deltaville, Virginia. 

In October they were back on board, and motored down the ICW (IntraCoastal Waterway) to Florida.  They then slogged against wind and tide heading SE, before finally getting more of the trade winds near the BVI and making their way to Grenada, arriving in April 2019.  The boat was lifted out, and put back in the water in early December, then sailed up to St Lucia.  A week later, I joined them for the first leg of their round the world trip, from St Lucia to Panama, stopping in Colombia on the way.  Graham and Kate sail the ocean passages with one or two extra crew, the shorter island hops by themselves, and their Ovni 395 is set up as an “expedition” boat; aluminium hull, lifting keel, lots of spares, a serious first aid kit including an AED, and electricity and water generation.  The Ovni 395 is probably the smallest of this class of boat and we spent many evenings discussing what would be the ideal boat in terms of size, onboard kit, and sail configuration.

We were starting in the World ARC Rally 2020, a fifteen month, 30000 mile trip for the full entrants.  We, however, were only taking part as far as Panama City as Graham and Kate want to take a lot longer on their circumnavigation.  The reason for joining World ARC on this relatively short leg was to guarantee a date for going through the Panama Canal, of which more later.

I joined the yacht, and was immediately immersed in the full round of provisioning, rig checking, and all those other small jobs on boats that seem to be never-ending.  Kate has got food and liquid provisioning well organised on her spreadsheet.  Another spreadsheet calculates the electricity consumption, our likely production from solar panels and the wind generator, the amount of time we would need to run the engine to make up any shortfall, and how much fuel that would leave us for any motoring, and what that range would be.  We left with every possible space full of spare water in case the water maker failed, and eight spare jerry cans of fuel on the deck.

A folder on the yacht had all the checklists, such as pre-departure and daily, and other information such as what to do if we lost the rudder, or “black ship” – an entire loss of electricity.

All the ARC yachts are provided with YB trackers so that people can follow their progress.  We also had a Garmin inReach GPS which can also send and receive messages, the main GPS on the navigation system, and of course everyone’s mobile phones have inbuilt GPS.  There was also a sextant and all the tables for our part of the world, which we used occasionally for practice.  Communication was via VHF, SSB radio giving a potential range of hundreds, if not thousands of miles, and a satellite phone.  The ARC has a twice daily fleet chat on the SSB, and we could also download the weather as grib files.

There’s radar on the yacht; the main use was at night when trying to determine whether a line squall was coming our way.  Each lifejacket had a personal AIS installed.  Surfing down 4m waves at ten knots meant that it would take quite a while to get back (especially against 30knots of wind), so the main objective was to make sure you never went over the side.

The big day arrived, with a “race” start.  As most of the yachts had never raced before (in fact I was surprised at the limited sailing some of the people had done), we approached the start line cautiously, keeping well away from other yachts.  The gun sounded, we crossed the line, and set sail for Santa Marta, Colombia.

The stages of the journey can be found below.