Gateway to the Pacific: Arrived in Colón

The trip to Colón in Panama took us just under 6 days. We arrived on January 26th at around 11 PM, but due to the pitch-black darkness, we couldn’t enter the marina immediately, so we anchored in the bay in front and spent the night there. I’m always surprised by how dark a night without lights can actually be; in the morning, everything looks completely different. You get a partial impression of your location on the map, but you get the full picture only in daylight.

We managed to find a spot in Shelter Bay Marina, where we also found our fellow ARC Rally participants. It was interesting to meet them again; I was almost certain they had already sailed on. This could mean that the canal transit will be somewhat more complicated, but we’ll see.

We settled in nicely at the marina, right at the beginning of the dock, which will be the best position for when we start bringing things onto the boat. This is a destination where you need to buy everything, even what you think you won’t need, because there’s virtually nothing available in the Pacific. The next well-supplied destinations are Tahiti and New Zealand, and according to the guides, even they don’t have everything we Europeans expect to find in stores.

The marina is located within the abandoned Fort Sherman military base, built by the Americans at the beginning of the 20th century to control passage through the canal. The jungle has now reclaimed much of the base after the Americans broke the treaty and handed it over to Panama on January 1, 2000, which then mostly abandoned it.

Shelter Bay Marina is also known as one of the filming locations for James Bond movies. The opening scene of “Quantum of Solace” (2008) was filmed here, when the area was still in somewhat better condition. Ten years later, here we are at the same location, but now with a marina.

The Panama Canal is now 100% owned by Panama and is the country’s main economic driver. Almost every citizen is connected to the canal in some way; either working directly for it or for canal-related businesses.

We need to reorganize things on the boat, make a list of everything we need to buy, and go to town to the immigration office and meet with our agent, who should arrange the necessary documentation for the canal transit. By a lucky coincidence, the agent was at the marina today and saw on the list that we had arrived, so we took care of everything on the boat and received detailed instructions on further procedures in Colón.

There’s a daily bus from the marina to Colón’s shopping zone, where there are several different types of stores, including a huge hypermarket. The marina management says that Colón is not a very safe city and doesn’t recommend being in town after dark… as if there are vampires :). Colón is about 15-20 km away, depending on whether you take the ferry across the canal or go via the locks.

So, let’s go see what it’s all about…

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