4th August Panama Canal

4^th August 2015 Panama

Entering the canal zone at around 0600 we were running a little late and in for a long hot day. A quick breakfast and up on the foredeck jostling people for the best position. I have found that if I can’t get a suitable spot I just stand close to someone and start coughing badly, works everytime.

I actually moved around the ship quite a bit taking photos from various vantage points and then returned to the foredeck where I discovered Nancy holding for me a very good spot (bless her) and we stayed there while moving through the lochs each time. Fortunately we also had a grand view on the port side from our own cabin so during the time we were travelling through the lake areas that’s where we retreated to.

It was a long hot sweaty day very humid and even though we were in shade a lot of the time I managed to get sunburnt just from reflection.

What can I say about Panama Canal it is a feat of engineering ingenuity, guts and glory. Started by the French who lost about 20,000 workers on the job mainly through malaria, yellow fever, snake bite and other heinous causes. Abandoned for several years through lack of funds. Then the Yanks took it on and changed the design from a sea level cut to the gravity fed loch system. Roosevelt, the newly elected youngest ever president of the US was right behind the new scheme. An engineer was appointed and in the initial year or so it was a complete failure. He resigned and a gutsy engineer took it on board and actually brought the project to a halt for over twelve months while they drained the swamps, sprayed the mossies, built decent accommodation and generally made it a place where work could be carried out and people wouldn’t die of yellow fever etc.

Typically the yanks brought in heavy machinery and plenty of it. Built railways to shift everything and used engineering ingenuity to solve problem.

I was fortunate enough to watch a documentary on the project but of course cannot remember half the facts but it is certainly an interesting enough project to warrant Googling it, which I will do when I can get reliable access to internet, probably back home.

We had expert commentary as we travelled through the lochs and you can see just how how amazing it all is. Especially when you consider when it was designed and built.

Now they are in the process of duplicating the lochs and widening the channels and there is talk of building another canal.

I will endeavour to post some photos and you can see how the lochs are working by the different levels the ships in front of us are.

You will also be able to see just what a tight fit it is for modern ships and in our case we had well under half a metre clearance each side.

Ships use their own propulsion to move into a loch, a couple of blokes row out in a dingy to pass lines from ship to shore and apparently this is still considered the most efficient way. As the ship enters the loch, cables are attached from ship to ‘Donkey’s’ on a rack and pinion railway and these units, in our case three each side, tighten and slacken the cables to keep the ship off the loch walls each side and to help stop the ship moving forward once in the loch. This is all controlled by two pilots on the ship communicating with the ‘Donkey’ drivers using radios and a series of bells and lights. Each ‘Donkey’ cost about US$2.3 million.

In the documentary I watched it showed the loch system control room, it has a duplicated model of the loch system that is fully synchronised with the loch itself where by the operator can see exactly at what stage each operation has taken place and cannot initiate any next stage until the pre-ceding stage has been completed. The whole process is quite intriguing.    

Of course once through the canal we were into the Pacific Ocean, Nancy got gloomy and stated morosely that we were well and truly on our homeward run now.