EPIC World Quest – Panama Canal Transit
An Engineering Dream over 380 years in the Making
The earliest written recording of canal crossing the Isthmus of Panama dates all the way back to 1534 when Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered the survey of a shipping route that give the Spanish a military advantage over the Portuguese. The thought was proposed again in 1788 by Thomas Jefferson, then foreign minister to France, suggesting that Spain build the canal. Later negotiations in 1820 between the United States and Gran-Colombia (present day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama) collapsed due to a lack of trust between the parties. The California Gold Rush of 1849 renewed a desire for a means to rapidly cross the Isthmus of Panama. The United States constructed the first Panama Railroad between 1850 and 1855.
The success of France’s Ferdinand de Lesseps in constructing the Suez Canal in Egypt between 1859 and 1869 reignited the possibility of building the Panama Canal. While the length of the Panama Canal is only 40% the length of the Suez Canal there were several additional challenges that weren’t originally considered. Between 1881 and 1894 during the French attempt over 22,000 men died from yellow fever, malaria, and accidents. Bankrupt, the French abandoned their attempt asking the United States for $100 million for assets already in place. The United States leveraged a canal option in Nicaragua and purchased the canal zone for $40 million in 1903. The United States built the canal between 1904 and 1914.
The Panama Canal Crossing
We started our Panama Canal crossing at 8:00 a.m. in the morning entering the first set of locks. We completed our crossing at 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon after an 8-hour transit. Our crossing was a little faster than the average crossing of approximately 10 hours. The first set of locks on the Atlantic side is the Gatun Locks, a set of 3 locks that raise the vessel 85 feet above sea level to the largest man-made lake in the world. Water lost to the both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from operating the locks is replenished each year during Panama’s rainy season.
After the Gatun locks, our ship transited through Lake Gatun (about 15 miles) to a natural portion of the Chagres River (about 5 miles) through the dynamite blasted Culebra Cut (about 8 miles) through the mountains. This narrow passageway led us to the Pedro Miguel Locks drops the vessel down 31 feet to Miraflores Lake. Miraflores Lake is just over a mile long before reaching the Miraflores Locks that drop the vessel down another 54 feet back to sea level. The entire trip through the canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific is approximately 48 miles.
The original canal with allowed ships up to 110 feet wide and 1200 feet long. Our cruise ship the Oceania Insignia is 84 feet wide (allowing 13 feet clearance on each side of the ship) and is 591 feet long. During our port stop in San Diego, we toured the aircraft carrier USS Midway which was too big to transit the Panama Canal. In Los Angeles our ship docked a few piers away from the USS Iowa, a Battleship that once transited the Panama Canal. Expansion of the canal in 2008 allowed larger Panamax container and cargo vessels that are up to 180 feet wide and 1,400 feet long. Some of these vessels can carry 14,000 standard twenty-foot-long shipping containers.
Our Impressions
While we have given history and facts of the canal, however, these facts and our description do not do justice to the experience of passing through via ship. If you are an engineering or maritime enthusiast, you will be in awe and even if you are not, it truly is amazing to see how this process flows seamlessly with behemoth vessels passing through with only inches to spare and the sheer volume of ships in the off the coast afloat in either ocean waiting on their scheduled time to pass. Take a moment and watch the time-lapse video to get an idea of the perspective we had of the passage.
