After Saturday's "Beating of the Retreat" at Nelson's Dockyard -- and the inevitable closing parties signalling the end of Antigua Race Week -- the Caribbean racing (and cruising) season winds down pretty quickly.

Sunday morning activities generally include: waking up wondering where you are; reaching for aspirin; grabbing just about anything that can pronounce "halyard" and signing it on as delivery crew; getting North pronto before insurance policies cancel (or quadruple in price) because of the start of hurricane season.

This Caribbean ritual has played out for years with few glitches. But this year, sailors heading West are going to find a big problem -- a huge traffic jam at the Panama Canal.

According to a recent report there are currently more than 150 sailboats on the Caribbean side of the canal waiting to cross. Many have been told it will be weeks, in a few cases, months -- before they will be able to get through. Sailor Rod Heikell and wife Lu, aboard Skylax wrote:

"There are around 50 yachts in the Flats anchorage at Colon, another 30 in the Panama Canal Yacht Club (PCYC), 30 or 40 in Shelter Bay Marina and a similar number cruising the Atlantic Panama coast. All of us are waiting to go through the Panama Canal and things aren't looking good. On Skylax we arrived a week ago and our given date for the transit is June 23rd, a nine and a half week wait. And the same goes for all the other yachts here except for anyone with a few thousand surplus dollars who can arrange a special transit."

A manager for the Canal Authority stated that groups of yacht transits have been dropped from two per day to one per week because of their negative impact on commercial shipping transits. Read more about it here.