Day 11 East - 01/12/22 - Panama Canal

I surprised myself by waking up early at 6:15am  to be able to view the bridge of the Americas which besides the skyline of Panama City is one of the first major scenic attraction when doing the South to North .  

 

The transit began around 7am and ended just after 4pm when we entered the Caribbean Sea.      This transit was our 5th one and each has been nice.  On the south part of the canal one passes through two sets of locks (Miraflores and Pedro Miguel) which raises the ships a total of 84-85 feet.  The French originally want to build a sea level canal, but the American, John Stevens, figured out a lock system was needed.

 

On the north end of the canal are the Gatun locks which have 3 chambers to lower us back down to sea level.  Also at the Gatun locks is the Gatun Dam which forms the world's largest manmade lake, Gatun Lake.  I'll not recount the passing through each of the locks but just comment on a few things that interested me. Most of the time I spent my viewing time on the bow of the ship.

 

The first thing that surprised me was spotting a deer on the little island on the north end of the Pedro Miguel locks .  A few minutes later I spotted a crocodile (there are no alligators in Panama except cayman) from the Lido restaurant.  It was leisurely swimming near shore.  I've never seen these types of wildlife on previous transits.

 



During the transit there are 3 large bridges that we passed under:  Bridge of the Americas, Centennial Bridge, and Atlantic (newest). 

 

Just before we exited the canal, we passed the Carnival Pride cruise ship which did a partial transit of the canal.

 

On our return voyage, we'll reverse the route and transit it north to south which is the direction we've done it the most.

 

At the end of the transit, the Captain announced that we would not be able to divert to Puerto Límon but would do a technical stop at the previously scheduled Cartagena to fulfill the requirement for a foreign port stop as required under the PVSA (Passenger Vessel Security Act) enacted in the late 1800's.  Additionally because of the short stop in Cartagena, we now will make a stop at HAL's private island, Half Moon Cay.  We'll try snorkeling there once again.

 

After a light dinner, we adjourned to our stateroom (the main stage was dark tonight) and watched Spectre as it had a Day of the Dead scene at the beginning and is a prequel to Time to Die.  And so ended our Panama Canal transit day.

 



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