I've been looking forward to seeing the Panama canal for so long, and the thought that we may have had to skip it if we had shipped directly to Ecuador was definitely a factor in taking the gamble to come through Nicaragua.
Some of you may have known me long enough to know that I studied civil engineering at uni and, whilst I may never have been that civil, I've always considered myself an engineer at heart by training and general approach to problems and life (well, not Maria - no amount of engineering can explain a problem like Maria) and I still love to see how man has shaped the world around him through construction, and the Panama Canal is a prime example of when it goes right - eventually.
First attempted by the French in the 1880s after their success in Suez, it didn't start well - bad ground conditions, dreadful mortality to yellow fever and a bit of traditional Gallic stubbornness to not consider changing design from a sea level canal to a lock canal wasted millions of whatever currency and thousands of lives, and ended up in complete failure and abandonment after 8 years.
Roll on to the early 1900s and the US, trying to become a world power, decide to start meddling in Central America for their own ends and back Panamanian rebels trying to establish an independent nation from what was then Colombia, effectively allowing Panama to secede under US military blockade....in return for a nice bargain basement price for the purchase of the old canal workings and route. This is just a couple of years before Teddy Roosevelt sends the great white fleet around the world to start showing off his big stick.....
Construction re-started in 1904 and took 10 years. and it came in ahead of time and under budget. And what I love is to think about the technology of the time. Electricity exists but not really for portable use. Internal combustion engines are in their infancy, low powered and unreliable. Tracked vehicles didn't really come about until tanks later in the first world war. Hydraulics are not on the scene yet. Ariel photography - what's that?
The route has been surveyed the old fashioned way by hacking paths through the tropical rain forest so that well dressed edwardian military gentlemen can peer through big wood and brass theodolites and levels. And when construction starts it is with steam shovels controlled by cables, and trains to haul the muck away. At least they now had dynamite.....and for the first time public health measures to control stagnant water and mosquitoes in the living areas proved the link between insects and infection.
The lock systems are constructed in mass concrete - no reinforcement at this time, and is one of the largest projects to use this new wonder material - well, since the Roman Pantheon that is.....
What is new is the use of electricity to control the mechanisms of the lock sluices and gates. All the water is fed by gravity from Gatun lake, so no pumping is involved. The gates are hollow steel and effectively float to support their weight, mounted onto mass concrete which has very little tensile strength. They built in tracks for "Mules" - little moving trains that clamp onto the tracks to hold big vessels in the centre of the locks and away from the walls to prevent damage - the boats move under their own power, the mules just move with them to keep them aligned. Actually its all quite neat and simple, just big.
And this has effectively controlled shipping design and economics for the 20th century. The lock dimensions were considered ample at the time - 33.5m wide by 330m long. The RMS Queen Mary was the first major vessel launched that would not fit through the canal, but she was only intended to ever sail the North Atlantic in 1936, and even US aircraft carriers up until the Midway class in the tail end of World War 2 were designed to be able to fit through.
Jimmy Carter eventually did the decent thing and signed an agreement to return the Panama Canal and land to Panama from 1999 and that went ahead as planned, despite Manuel Noriega's fly in the ointment act in the 1980s.
Almost 100 years on and the canal authority decided to finally expand the canal's capabilities in both size and traffic. The new locks still took from 2007 to 2016 to build - only 1 year less than the whole original canal, and they were built with all the benefits of modern technology, including contract disputes and the good old generic "project delays". The new locks double the cargo capacity of the canal and allow cargo ships upto 2.6 times larger - upto 13,000 twenty foot container equivalents from 5,000 on the old panamax ship limits.
The highest toll paid for the old canal was USD375k paid by a cruise ship. The highest on the new locks to date is USD1.2m by a container ship. But considering that it takes 8-14 hours to transit the canal compared to 14 days to sail round the bottom of South America, and that can easily cost USD100k per day in fuel, its actually quite a bargain.
The cheapest toll was paid by a guy in 1928 who paid 37 cents to swim it - based on his height of 5'6". They still made him go with a canal pilot in a rowing boat, and a sniper to keep the crocodiles away.
We got to do the full transit which took about 9 hours of actual boat travel. Its actually very dull and slow - nothing happens fast on the canal, although given that the locks move 26 million gallons of water each time they equalise and that part actually only takes around 8 minutes, its a bit like Concorde - the fact that it does it so smoothly day in day out without any drama is a testament to the design and build. And as they had to cut the ground so far back to minimise landslides and debris flowing back into the canal, you don't really get a sense of what the land was like before the cut and lake. But when a full-width car carrier is coming in behind you it all suddenly becomes a lot more impressive - as per the top picture.
We revisited the Miraflores locks visitor centre the next day to see it from a different perspective. The level of detailed information there was very disappointing and we had to hang around a bit for the first of the days southbound vessels to make it that far down, but we did get to see the boat we were on previously coming back the other way joined by a bulk carrier, and in the background a Liquified Natural Gas tanker heading for the new lock complex....shows quite clearly the changes in size.....
And as a final "treat" today I got to get up at 6:00am to drive the car over to the Atlantic side along one of the old back roads through some of what is now national park - original rainforest and the tarmac follows the twists and changes of the landscape. The sun was just up and the mist was clinging to the forest canopy and it was stunning. Very tame compared to most of the spine of Central America, the Sierra Madre and the continental divide we've seen all the way down from Canada, but i'm buggered if I would have ever wanted to sail a boat through it.....
