Friday 19 February C Day -0

Today we left the Caribbean behind us and began the next part of our adventure. Our friends who are going to help with line handling trough the locks arrived. Our valiant volunteers are Chris and Dave (Chrisandaver Dream) and Karen and Mike (Chapter 2). All Brits together so anticipate we'll be drinking buckets of tea. By coincidence Karen and Mike come from my home town Kenilworth.
All come aboard early afternoon and we have our fenders rigged and lines for the locks ready. Our advisor is only an hour late so we should be through the up locks in daylight today. It's an hour motoring to get to the first of the Gatun locks. Here we raft up with a catamaran in the middle and Inspiration Lady on the far side and are last to enter. There's only a small cargo boat a distance ahead of us which shouldn't cause a lot of back wash when they turn the propeller.
David and Gary (Inspiration Lady) motor the three boats into position and the Canal people throw down a light line to our fore and aft. Our line handlers tie our heavier lines with a bow line tied on to these and they are pulled up to the side of the lock 8m above and put our bowlines over their heavy duty bollards. Our line handlers will tighten and slacken these lines as we rise to keep us off the wall and in the centre of the lock. The door closes behind us and the excitement (and anxiety) rises. This is it. We're on our way.
The lock takes 12 minutes to fill with water and we rise up to look back over the gate to Colon and the Caribbean behind us. A few moments later the gates ahead open, the Canal line handlers unhook us from the bollards and we are instructed by our advisor to proceed onto the middle lock where we go through the same.

An hour later and we are through the 3 up locks, 26m above sea level and into the freshwater Gatun lake which is a dammed reservoir. It all went very smoothly, our line handlers had done a great job getting us through without incident. Now it was my turn to go in to action mode and serve a meal to our advisor quick, quick while he directed David to the mooring ball where we would spend the night. Almost as soon as we were secured to this large flat ball a pilot boat picked him up and we were alone. Apart from the two catamarans tied to the adjacent mooring ball ad Inspiration Lady tied to ours. There was a well deserved curry for our crew, some chilled beers and then to bed because we had a 5.30 start in the morning.