The Captain promised us sunshine and somewhat cooler temperatures in the Canal than yesterday in Cartagena. After the promised early start - we were up at 6:15 - we headed into the first chamber of the Gatun Lock. Of course, since we don’t have a covered balcony on this cruise, what happened? The Captain lied!!! It started to drizzle, of course! Then it started to rain, making it impossible to stay outside to watch. Fortunately, it didn’t last long and by the time we were set to be raised to the first level, it had pretty much ended, but it was extremely humid. Fortunately, the Captain is a better boat driver than he is a weatherman!! Unfortunately, we were on the wrong side of the ship to see the line crew at work; that had to wait until a little later.
Once through the lock, we anchored in Gatun Lake and the tenders were dropped to take those participating on shore excursions into the Colon Yacht Club. Well, that’s something of a misnomer, since there were no yachts to be seen, and there wasn’t much of a yacht club building - in fact there wasn’t any building there at all. It was more or less a dock with an awning and a walkway, and a parking lot for the tour buses. So calling it a “Yacht Club” might have been a stretch, but who would want to visit the Gatun Parking Lot??
We actually had a bus ride of over an hour to get to Gamboa, where we boarded the tour ‘ferry’, a three-deck tour boat that held about 300 people, for the balance of the transit. This bus ride avoided the tour boat having to cross Gatun Lake; instead we boarded just where the Chagres River meets the canal. The importance of the river is that it and its many tributaries combine as the main source of water for the canal and it was from this river that the initial flooding was done to create Gatun Lake.
Once on board, we set out and our guide explained that we were the “lead” boat in the “southbound convoy” and would be sharing our lockage with the ship that was behind us - an NYK car carrier that looked like a floating apartment building with no windows. When full, it could carry as many as 3,000 vehicles. This became the highlight of the day for all of us, even those of us who have transited the canal before. It is a completely different experience to be sitting at the front of a 1,000 foot long, 109 foot wide lock, watching a 900 foot long, 106 foot wide ship come in behind you. Most of us were just hoping that its brakes worked and it would be able to stop in time, with help from the 8 mules guiding it, before it turned our boat, and us, into driftwood!. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of the perspective we had on that ship…
The entire trip went from the docks at Gamboa, through the Gaillard Cut, the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks, under the Bridge of the Americas and out into the Pacific, thus completing our fifth, and Norm and Barb’s first, transit of the Panama Canal.
Shortly after we got underway the bar opened, giving Norm an opportunity to compare Panama’s beer to Colombia’s beer (same beer, different can) and the staff served a very nice buffet, complete with water (YES!) and soft drinks. Since it had been AT LEAST four hours since most of the people onboard had eaten, there was a mad rush for the food. Fortunately none of the boat staff were injured in the ensuing stampede! You would think these people had never seen food before!
Overall, it was a great day and a very interesting new perspective on the canal. From that angle, it really looked like the Trent-Severn canal system locks on steroids, and it was really neat to be up close and personal with lock walls and gates that are almost 100 years old.
One of the other highlights was seeing some of the work that has already started on the new locks at each end of the canal. These are set to open on the centennial of the canal, in August of 2014 and will be able to take post-Panamax ships, meaning anything that is currently afloat or on the drawing boards that can’t go through the current canal system. The locks will be 80 feet deep, 1400 feet long and at least 200 feet wide…Personally, we can’t think of anything that could be that big and still float! Well, we guess there IS Oasis of the Seas, but…….
And for a bit of a ‘blast from the past’, the featured entertainer this evening was Adrian Zmed. Anyone remember ‘T.J. Hooker’, the cop show that starred William Shatner? Well, Adrian was the rookie partner with all the hair (no, not Heather Locklear, the other one). He has done quite a bit of performing in Broadway musicals (especially ‘Grease’) and put on a really good show. He performs both here and on Island Princess.
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