West to the Pacific Ocean

In order to really see the Panama Canal, you need to transit the entire system.  Since our cruise ship only went as far as Gatun Lake and then returned to Colon to await the return of the passengers who booked excursions.

We signed up for the tour boat excursion that traveled form Gatun Lake all the way through the canal including the Pacific locks and out into the Pacific Ocean.  We disembarked the Coral Princess in Gatun lake by launch to shore, where we took a bus to the tour boat dock.

The biggest advantage to taking the tour boat was the change in perspective of what you are seeing.  On the cruise ship, you are always at least ten stories of above the water all the way to 15 stories.

Traveling through a water ditch is not always that exciting, but the canal has a lot of vessel traffic and currently there is a lot of maintenance work going on.  There is also a lot of work associated with the building of the new larger locks.  Traveling at near the water level gives an up close and personal feeling.  You can really feel the change in the water level as the vessel descends to the Pacific Ocean level.  And of course there is always that bit of excitement as you realize the large ship that is going to share a lock with you would crush our small vessel like a bug if there was any miscalculation as it slows upon entering the lock behind you. 

Below are two short videos of the lock thru.

Entering the lock

Leaving the lock

Happy Mother's day

I am pretty sure most of us who have had their mother's pass on, use this day to reflect back on the times we shared with them.

Both Anneke and I were lucky enough to share many good times with them over the years.  They are gone but not forgotten.

As a two continent and military family, we have shared these memories in many different places.

Panama Canal arrival

Transiting the Panama Canal has been on my list for a long time.  It is really one of the wonders of the modern world. Depending on how you look at its history, it has taken hundreds of years and thousands of lives to build.  There are many documents and opinions on the canal, so I will not spend any time covering its history.  A good short version of this long story can be read here.

We arrived at the entrance at sunrise and passed dozens of cargo ships waiting their turn to transit the canal Atlantic locks.  Our ship moved to the head of the line for a simple reason.  Cruise ships have priority because of the higher fees they are willing to pay. There are complicated fee structures for the cargo ships, but for cruise ships the fees are based on berths.  Occupied berths pay $115 for each and $92 for each empty berth.  The Coral Princesses transit, this time, was around $235, 000.  The largest fee ever paid was over $400,000 by a cruise ship. Somehow we were talked into being part of the filming of the ship entering the locks from a helicopter. Our assignment was to hold up letters that helped spell out our ships name for the 100 year anniversary of the canal. This took a lot longer than we expected, but we did make it into the ships video of the cruise. 

  

Even though we have been through many locks in numerous countries over the years, it was still a fantastic experience.  In particular, I found the coordinated operation of the guide tractors impressive.  As you can see in the pictures and videos, there is very little clearance for those ships that are built to be "Panamax", which means they are the largest ships possible to transit the locks. 

 http://youtu.be/lK2C16uk86U

 http://youtu.be/lc9lDCUCKCo

One exciting change that is coming in 2015, is the opening of a new set of locks that will allow even larger ships to transit the canal.  As we entered the lock area, we passed by a set of the new lock doors waiting ashore for the canal construction to be completed at the end of next year.  Despite all the modern technology, I noted that they still use small row boats to actually go out and checks ship draft marks on some of the vessels.

To complete our Panama Canal experience we next took a smaller tour boat through the complete canal system including the Pacific locks, which will be the subject of the next post.