PANAMA CANAL

We approached the Panama Canal at dawn through what looked like a ship graveyard.  Tankers were lined up in the sodium orange glow as far as the eye could see.  And black frigate birds wheeled across the sky as Rorschach grey clouds drifted by in the hazy dawn’s early light.

Now, you may think you’ve seen a lot of freighters at anchor — maybe around the port of Los Angeles or New York City — but the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal was like one of those strange silent places in the Arizona desert where old planes go to die.  It was like cruising through some surreal science fiction movie like “Blade Runner”, but without the rain.

We slowly glided past the anchored freighters and then through a massive breakwater sheltering Limon Bay, named by Christopher Columbus on his third and final voyage to the Americas.  And then we butted right to the front of the line like white royalty.

We cruised past Colon, an industrial wasteland straight out of Dante’s Inferno, back-lit by the rising sun, turning the white cranes and petrochemical tanks a burnt orange.  Neatly-stacked red and yellow containers rose into the sky like some new architectural style — “post modern shipping box”.  And Pilot tug boats came buzzing out of the city’s harbor like busy little bumble bees in search of honey.  Colon was clearly a working city that never slept.

At the north edge of Colon, the French are building a spacey new cable-state bridge across the canal over to a sleepy beach town on the coast that will soon become a fancy resort.  KACHING!  The unconnected bridge segments hung in the air like a series of ginormous modern art sculptures.

The Panama Canal is the largest port in the Americas behind Los Angeles and Long Beach.  It was chosen as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1994.

The Spanish were the earliest non-natives to arrive at the Isthmus of Panama.  But they only saw its potential as a very difficult land route connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The French were the first to start building an all-water route, but financial woes and malaria and yellow fever eventually stopped them dead in their tracks — over 25,000 Canal laborers died from tropical disease!   We passed the old French Canal as we approached the Gatun Lock.  It was ridiculously narrow, perhaps wide enough to handle a small barge.  To give you a sense of scale, the lifeboats on the Norwegian Jade would have barely have fit.

After its independence in 1903, Panama negotiated a sketchy deal with the U.S. to build the Canal which was completed eleven years later.  The U.S. owned and managed the Canal until 1999, when President Jimmy Carter gave it back to the Panamanians.

The Canal is now managed by the Panama Canal Authority (PCA), an autonomous government entity that wields great power in Panama.

The Canal makes about $3 billion a year but it costs $750 million to operate, so efficiency and timing are the keys to making the whole operation work smoothly and profitably.  They also have several lucrative side businesses in play, like supplying fresh water and power production.  Plus there’s the revenue from handling all the containers and natural gas.  The Canal makes about $10 million a day.  And they only take cash. The Norwegian Jade was paying over $100,000 to just do it’s partial transit.  

The Canal is also the second biggest Free Trade Zone after Hong Kong, meaning it’s a great place to shop — in bulk.

Since its opening in 1914, the Canal has handled over a million ships.  The most transits in a single day happened in 1968, when 65 ships crossed the Isthmus.

The Panama Canal recently celebrated its 100th anniversary.  It connects 144 sea routes, reaching 1,700 ports in 160 countries.  It is one of the world’s greatest logistical service hubs.

The recently completed Panama Canal expansion project was built to handle the new Panamax ships which are quickly changing the face of the world shipping game because the new supertankers can carry three times more booty than the normal freighter.  That spells taller bridges, like the Bayonne Bridge servicing New York, and the need for deeper harbors and channels.

The expansion project began in 2007 with the lofty goal of doubling the waterway’s capacity, and it was completed in 2016.  According to the PCA’s promotional brochure: “Strict environmental controls were implemented during its construction including, reforestation, wildlife rescue, and the preservation of archaeological and paleontological resources.  Plus, the bigger ships reduce CO2 emissions and help slow down climate change.”

The canal is 55 miles long and it takes ten hours to transit the three locks.  But it’s an 8,000 mile, three week journey around South America.  Do the math.

The Kansas Southern Railroad has the monopoly on land transit through the canal, primarily carrying shipping containers, grain, and gas.

The approach to the first lock is lined with dense jungle to protect the shoreline and draw rain like a magnet.  Our two pilot boats shadowed us through the entrance canal that was about a quarter-mile wide in case there was an emergency.  We moved at a snail’s pace with tankers following us in an orderly line like a slow motion parade.

As we entered the Gatun Lock eight goofy little trains with tin toy whistles called mules, four on each side, pulled our ship with cables through the first lock up to Gatun Lake, as water was pumped into the lock and we rose 85 feet.  At 965-feet-long, the Norwegian Jade was only a few feet short of being designated a supertanker.  And we barely fit into the narrow lock, with only about a foot on each side of the ship.  The next day we noticed several deep gouges in the Jade’s bow where we had hit the metal walls of the lock.  Our Captain said that it probably happened when the ship was being lowered in the lock because there’s more movement when the water is being released.

The Westerdam was in front of us, a ship that Inna and I had done a Holland America Caribbean cruise on a few years back.  The Westerdam was transiting all three locks to the Pacific, which is usually how it’s done.  But  we were only doing a partial transit through the first lock up to Gatun Lake. Our ship would be dropping most of the passengers off at Gatun Lake for various shore excursions and then turning around and heading back to Colon where the passengers would re-board at the end of the day.

Most people don’t realize this, but the Canal actually runs north to south from the Atlantic.  So, the Sun rises in the Pacific ocean and sets in the Atlantic!

Off-pink, two floor, standard U.S. military, WWII tropical architecture houses the Canal administrative buildings.  And the U.S. military maintains a very high-profile presence throughout Panama.  We are definitely dug in deep and there to stay.

The canal has two lanes, plus the new Panamax lane, so boats can transit in both directions at the same time.

A medical emergency stooped our transit near the top of the first lock, screwing up the well orchestrated schedule for every ship in line as they waited for the poor unfortunate passenger to be transported to an ambulance.  This would also wreck havoc with all of the ship’s shore excursions.

Here’s another little known fact.  Your friends and family can watch your transit via a camera link on the Canal website.

The line handlers were Caribbean and wore blue uniforms.  They were always smiling and waving up to us on our balcony perches.  They seemed to be having a ball.

The substantial security force wore green uniforms and were Panamanian.  They guarded the security gates and pretty much ignored us.

Near the top of the first lock at the entrance to Gatun Lake were several curious structures, starting with a shiny white lighthouse.   Its purpose, other than decorative, was a mystery.

And right after the lighthouse there was a giant black and white bulls eye target that you might find on a shooting range.  It was attached to 40-feet-tall, white flagpoles, so it it could be raised and lowered.  But given all of the activity in the area, it would have been extremely dangerous to fire off a weapon of any kind, and virtually impossible to miss unless you were firing a missile.  We concluded that it was modern art come alive.

Right outside the fenced perimeter, it’s full-on jungle, giving the Canal a Jurassic Park sort of feel.  The lush hillsides close in upon the shipping channel like fortress walls and we could hear monkeys and birds singing in the trees.  I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see this man made mechanical wonder in its pristine state.  To envision a fifty-five-mile water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific in such a primeval location was indeed an act of extreme manifest destiny.  No surprise that the engineering wizards who finally pulled it off were mostly Scots.

Gatun Lake, at the top of the first lock, was filled with waiting tankers heading to the Atlantic, but it was strangely serene and quiet.  There were patrol boats and tugboats working the area and no pleasure craft in sight.  A few nice houses clung to the surrounding hillsides, but this part of Gatun Lake had an off limits feel.  It seemed to have an invisible force field around it.

It would have been nice to cruise through the entire Canal, all the way to the other end on the Pacific.  But we did the next best thing by taking the ship’s shore excursion to Panama City.

All in all, our partial transit of the Panama Canal took about two hours and was endlessly entertaining.  And even a partial transit was entirely unique and the experience of a lifetime.