The Panama Canal, Nothing is impossible

True story! How we got professional Swedish line Handlers for the Panama canal.

Since we are just the two of us on the boat and we needed four line handlers and a Captain for the canal, we came up with a crazy idea. We started a FB messenger group "Panama 2022". This was in mid December 2021, when we were still in Trinidad. We sent out a group message - " We will transit the Panama canal sometime during spring, earliest March. We need to be five onboard, the Captain and four line handlers. We came up with this crazy but funny idea to ask this odd fun group if you would be willing to help out. We just thought we should ask. If not that's ok, then we ask someone else".

To the story, these are all college friend from Sweden, competent on boats. But we haven't had that much contact over the years.

The answers came in very quickly:

• Sounds interesting, I would be happy to help out

• Fun, Need some extra thoughts

• What a surprisingly, inspiring and a little crazy idea. I really have to think about this. When approximately will this happen?

• Wow, this is a bucket list item I didn't know I had on the list...

So that was the start of this crazy idea... And at the end they all jumped on it, and came and helped us for the transit of the Panama canal. But if you fly all the way from Sweden of course you want added value. So they joined us for two weeks in the paradise of San Blas before we did the Panama canal.