Panama Day 10: Canal Transit

Saturday -- Day 10: November 12, 2011

Taken from my hotel balcony --  definitely a room with a view!   

This was my last full day in Panama and the day I chose to do a partial transit of the canal.  I booked the trip through American Airlines and it turned out to be an incredible excursion at a great price.  There were a couple of minor hitches in the plans, but nothing overwhelming or unusual for Panama -- after all, this is a Latin country where “mañana” is not just the word for tomorrow, but a way of life!

The port facilities outside of Panama City.

I called the day before to confirm my tour and this is where I ran into a problem.  The first number I called was a non-working number, which was not a good sign.  The second number I called was answered by someone who spoke only Spanish and finally, after speaking to someone in the background, connected me to another individual who spoke English and was able to confirm my reservation and said that I would be picked up at 7:30.  Having someone (anyone at this point) actually say that my reservation was down in black and white was reassuring and I didn’t give it another thought.

I planned on having the hotel’s free breakfast at 7:00 and have plenty of time to meet the 7:30 pick-up time.  The breakfast was again quite good considering it was free, and I had some fry jacks with mango jam and quiche with a couple cups of coffee.  I was in the lobby by 7:25 and ready to see one of the most amazing engineering accomplishments in the world.

Gantry cranes unloading a Maersk cargo ship.

7:30 came and went.  At 7:45 I tried to calm myself by assuming that they were on Panama time and would be there at any moment.  At 8:00 I had exhausted my patience waiting for a tour scheduled for impatient tourists like myself and had the front desk call the tour operator.  She quickly found out that the boat leaves from just a little further out on the Amador Causeway and that I was the last pick-up stop.  The bus arrived about 40 minutes later for the 10 minute drive to the marina.  The funny thing is, it was the same marina where I had dinner my first night in Panama City.  I remember thinking that many of the boats tied to the docks looked like they were outfitted for giving tours.

After we all got checked in and had our reservations confirmed, we walked a short distance to our boat.  There was a light drizzle that appeared to be lifting quickly, giving the first glimpse of what looked like a beautiful day ahead.  My judgment as a weatherman would be seriously tested later in the day. 

The boat was called the Islamorada.  Having lived in the Keys for six years I thought it was fitting that I would take a tour on a boat that harkened back to one of the best periods of my life.  The boat started out as the Santana 100 years ago and was built for the JP Morgan family.  It later was refitted to serve as a rum-running boat for Al Capone, shipping the illicit nectar of sugar cane from the Dominican Republic and Cuba to warehouses in Islamorada, hence the present day name.  Built of cherry and Panamanian mahogany, I’ll bet it was quite a nice boat in its day.  Before becoming a tour boat, the 94-ton Islamorada was used for fishing charters and was popular with many in the Hollywood crowd including John Wayne, Errol Flynn and Steve McQueen, who all tried their hand at catching black marlin.

The pilot boat approaching the Islamorada.

A light breakfast was being served below deck as we boarded but I was more interested in finding a perfect place to situate myself in order to get the most of the adventure.  On the bow there were chairs set out that no one was using, mainly because they had little puddles of water in them.  I chose instead a perch directly in front of the main salon that was slightly covered by an overhang from the pilot house, joining some folks from California that seemed quite nice. 

We began pulling into the main channel and were met by the harbor pilot.  There are three requirements for transiting the Panama Canal. First, payment must be made 48 hours in advance in cash or by wire transfer. There are stories of bygone days when suitcases of cash and even gold ingots were proffered as payment. Second, any vessel must be seaworthy and be able to do the transit under its own power. Even sailboats must have some means of propelling them through the water. Third, there must be a Canal Authority approved pilot aboard the vessel who has total control until the ship is through the canal.

Construction of the new canal.

The narrator of our trip was quite proud that, in his estimation, the canal is being run in a much more business-like way than when the Americans ran it.  An example he pointed to was how the fee structure changed once the Panamanians took control.  The Yanks managed the canal to cover their costs and provide a service to the world for maintaining world commerce.  Under the Americans, ships were charged for the tonnage in the hold.  It didn’t take long for shipping lines to develop the now ubiquitous Panamax ship with shipping containers stacked six high on the deck.  When the Panamanians took over, everything changed.  Now the ship must pay for what the ship was capable of carrying and not just simply tonnage.  The Americans covered their costs while the Panamanians make money.

Islamorada bow with the Bridge of the Americas in the background.

It turns out that the highest toll ever paid was just a few years ago when Carnival Cruise lines paid a whopping $441,000 to transit the canal. The least amount paid was by Richard Halliburton from Texas who paid just $ 0.36 to swim the canal. Of course he had to meet the requirements of all “vessels” transiting the canal; he had to pay in advance, prove he could make it through under his own power (requiring a doctor’s exam) and had to have a pilot. The pilot rode the distance in a row boat along with a Marine sharpshooter who was employed to keep away alligators and caimans that roam the lakes and rivers of Panama.

The tanker we followed on our journey through the locks.

As we made our way to the first set of locks, we went under the Bridge of the Americas that connects Panama City with western Panama and carries the continuation of the Pan American Highway.  We went past port facilities that were feverishly unloading ships so they could get underway to pick up their next cargo.  Our narrator filled in the gaps between places with stories of canal history and interesting tidbits like the fact that the ongoing dredging of the canal has pulled up four times the amount of earth as was originally excavated to build it.  Between the silt coming down the Chagres and other rivers and near constant mud slides, the canal needs continual work to keep it free and fulfill its intended purpose.  As he was relating this information we passed the huge dredging vessel, the D'Artagnan.  A few months later I saw a show on the D’Artagnan on the History Channel.

Tanker with a "mule" on each side.

One of many amazing stories is that the Chagres originally emptied into the Atlantic, but was re-routed to flow out of the Pacific instead.  The lakes are integral to the canal’s functioning and it took 11 years to fill Lake Gatun.  Now the water from the various lakes and rivers provide almost all of the power to make the canal work since there are no pumps anywhere in the system.  Gravity makes the system work as I soon found out when going through our first set of locks, the Miraflores Locks system.

It began to drizzle as we followed a tanker into the lock and watched the mules as they kept the ship in place and from bouncing off the sides as the lock filled.  The largest ships to go through the canal are Iowa class U.S. naval ships that have a whopping 20” to spare from end-to-end.  All pilots must be experienced seaman beforehand and start by taking sailboats and other small vessels through as they work their way up to being able to handle the giant Panamax container ships that are purpose built to fit just inside the canal locks.  There is even special training for piloting military submarines through the canal.  Every countries navy pays to use the canal with the exception of Costa Rica and Columbia – not a bad idea to be nice to your neighbors.

A better view of the mules.

For anyone interested in the history of the Panama Canal, The Path Between the Seas is must reading.  Columbus made three visits to Panama and the nearby waters were frequented by buccaneers like Henry Morgan and other famous navigators like Sir Francis Drake.

The Miraflores locks rise 33 feet in a mere 8 minutes.  One of the truly amazing things about all the locks is that the lock doors use only a 25 horsepower motor to open and close.  The key is that the doors don’t push any water and because they are hollow, they essentially float on the water.  A giant culvert delivers the water from underneath, giving the impression that you are in a giant caldron of boiling water.  From the locks we motored out onto Mira Flores Lake.  It was at this point that the breeze picked up and it started to rain in earnest.

The lock doors closing.

Determined not to miss out on the experience, I remained outside huddled under the overhang with the rain coming from the east.  It didn’t take long for my right side to become totally soaked from the waist down.  I should have grabbed one of the $4.00 ponchos they had for sale as soon as it started raining; instead I ended up wet through and through.  Even my shoes got so wet that I could see the water squeegeed out as I walked.  I quickly became concerned that the clothes I would have to travel in the following day would not be dry before I had to go.  I put those thoughts aside for the time being and concentrated on the present.

According to our narrator, the biggest income makers for Panama, in order of magnitude, are tourism, banking, the free trade zone in Colon and the canal.  The new canal being built to the west of the existing one, is being built totally without bond underwriting.  Amazingly, the current income stream generated by the old canal is sufficient to pay for construction of the new canal.  On the day the new canal opens, there will be no debt expense so only present operating costs and ongoing repairs will have to be covered.  I’m sure that the new income stream will be a huge boost to a Panamanian economy that is already thriving.  The new canal is scheduled to be completed in 2014 and the contracts with the various companies doing the work are heavily incentive laden.

There's nothing quite like a stylish plastic poncho!

The second canal will enable 24-hour a day transit in both directions instead of the 12-hour shifts currently in use (North to South from midnight to noon and South to North from noon to midnight).  It will no longer be necessary to port ships in Mira Flores or Gatun Lake.

I ran into a young guy from Alberta who, like me, had a background in the construction business and shared my fascination with the engineering that went into the building of the canal.  He was an interesting person who had spent two years living in China and Southeast Asia.  He highly recommended the experience and we talked a bit about the extent of censorship in China.  One of the first things he noticed in China was the inability to access news channels of any sort because the government blocked them to keep their people fed on the pabulum of communist propaganda.  There is nothing like going out and experiencing the real world to help shape and form your opinions of what life is actually like.

Terracing the hillside to make way for the second canal.

We continued on through the Culebra Cut, renamed the Gaillard Cut after Army Corps of Engineers Colonel David du Bose Gaillard, whose Eastern side was nearly vertical and is covered with heavy wire mesh to hold the hillside in place.  The cut was critical to both completion of the canal and the ultimate design.  When the French began building the canal it was with the intent of making a sea level canal by removing a section of the continental divide.  The Culebra summit stood at 210 feet when the effort began and by the time the French gave up in defeat, they had reduced the summit to 194 feet and a very narrow width.  When the Americans took over in 1904, they changed the design to a lock-dependent canal system and ultimately increased the width of the cut to nearly a third of a mile.  When the excavation was completed in 1913, the summit had been reduced to only 40 feet above sea level.  The Americans had literally moved a mountain.

The tour ended in Gamboa and we took very comfortable buses back to Panama City.  Somewhat embarrassed, I squished my way through the lobby and jumped into a hot shower to warm up from being soaked to the skin for the last several hours.  I wrung out my clothes in towels to remove as much moisture that I could before hanging them up to dry.  I still had to go out to fill the car with gas, so I put my tennis shoes on the bathroom counter and inserted the hair dryer in one of them and set it on low.  By the time I got back from Avenida Balboa, my left shoe was practically dry.  Since that worked so well, I did the same for my right shoe and it was dry by the time I went to dinner.  While at dinner, I left the hair dryer in my jeans and dried one leg by the time I returned.  I continued that process so that at least my jeans and shoes were dry.  The final few items could go home in a plastic bag.

Ship on Mira Flores Lake being handled by tugs.

I highly recommend a tour of the canal.  My particular tour had an excellent narrator who interspersed construction information and pertinent canal history with local jokes and generally entertained the crowd for the duration of the tour.  The lunch was good and it was fun to interact with the other passengers.  If you go to Panama, you have to see the canal and doing a partial transit allows you to see the locks up close and learn the history and significance of the canal at the same time.