Fuerte Amador Panama
It was an engineering miracle that cost twenty thousand lives to build. A boon to modern shipping, it was originally conceived to move large armies quickly. Today you can travel on a cruise ship from one ocean to the other, but it will cost your cruise line close to one million dollars every time it uses it.
Bridge of the Americas.
Yes, fees are that high. Cruise ships pay based on the number of staterooms (the Queen Victoria has about 900 or so). Some vessels pay by length and others by tonnage. Fees are exorbitant, but then so is sailing the long way, around Cape Horn, and it’s much, much safer. In its 100-plus years of operation, the Panama Canal has seen no serious accidents whatsoever.
Panama Canal locks
The canal is so busy that you had best make reservations well in advance (for a hefty fee) or wait for an open slot, sometimes for weeks. When you think “canal” you think of a long, flat concrete channel. Nope. The locks are concrete. Everything else is a hole in the dirt. They flooded an extensive valley, completely displacing a village. The whole canal was a major challenge, but the worst part was the notorious Culebra Cut. Today it is so densely vegetated that it doesn’t look dug. There is no hint how much faster the work there would have gone if what had just been dug didn’t keep burying itself in slides from above so that you had to dig the same ditch again and again. And even with all that it is still so narrow only one ship can pass through it at a time.
There are a number of tiny islands offshore. On the Pacific side, the developers linked four of them with a causeway built from all the rocks and dirt they hauled out of the Culebra Cut. The causeway and its islets together comprise Fuerte Amador, near which we anchored. It was a military installation until quite recently, and you know how touchy those people are about uninvited guests. Today however you can drive the length of the causeway visiting shops, eating in restaurants, and touring museums.
Seagulls on hawser Minutes after we tied up, they were shoulder to shoulder on our line.
There are several areas on board both inside and outside where you can watch the canal go by, but one of the best seats in the house is your own balcony. Except for breakfast and an hour in which I watched a most informative presentation on forensic uses of DNA by a retired medical examiner, I hung off my balcony rail with my binoculars as we traversed the isthmus of Panama.
In the course of the day I picked up three new birds for my life list and a couple of new ones for the South America list. I watched those goofy rail trams they call mules that keep ships on the straight and narrow going through the locks. [Sidebar: the captain said we went through with 18 inches to spare on each side.]
These three yachts rafted up to transit the locks
As we were coming out at the Atlantic end, three yachts were rafted together to transit to the Pacific side. A dinner companion who had spent years in the merchant marine was oohing and aahing about all the electronic gear the yachts carried. From Power Squadron I know that all that fancy stuff is pretty much de rigeur these days; nearly everyone carries radar, GPS, sonar, and the latest in radio communication, as did these guys. He’s an artist now and hasn’t kept up on marine technology.
Close up of oil tanker in locks. Basketball court is 60 feet up.
See closeup. That little square at base of funnel is a basketball hoop 6 stories up.
FYI Culebra means snake. Amador was a person’s name, but it also means lover. And if fuerte is a noun, it’s a fort, but if it’s an adjective it’s strong or powerful. Draw your own conclusions.