Scott McMurren writes for the Anchorage Daily News of his experience on the Canal.
There was an air of anticipation on our ship, the Safari Voyager, as we approached the Panama Canal. For the past week, we had sailed leisurely down the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica and Panama.
As we approached the canal, it was all business. The horizon was dotted with ships. Very big ships. The captain had mentioned there would be visitors on board. First came the ship inspectors. Next came the engineers. Then the ship pilot, who stands on the bridge as the ship’s crew lines up at the locks.
The skyline of Panama City was glistening in the afternoon sun as we anchored at our appointed spot to wait for our inspectors. But after the sun went down, it was the Bridge of the Americas that stood out, arching high over the Pacific entrance to the canal. Below, docks on both sides of the canal were busy loading and unloading thousands of CONEX containers.
One of the naturalists on board, Patrick Roca, was born in Panama. He’s been a guide for more than 20 years. “I picked up my American slang in the U.S. Army,” he said.
The connections between the U.S. and Panama run deep. But the thin strip of land that separates the Caribbean from the Pacific has been an active trade route for centuries.
“After the Spanish arrived, they started taking silver and gold from Peru and Bolivia,” said Roca. “For more than 100 years, there were mule trains that made the trek over Panama to ships waiting on the Caribbean side.”
The first railroad across the Isthmus was completed in the 1840s. Then, after the French abandoned their effort to build a canal, the U.S. military built the canal. The first ship sailed through in 1914.
Roca is quick to point out that the original canal itself is just one way to move goods from the Pacific to the Caribbean (or vice versa). After all, it’s expensive for ships to transit the canal. The rates are based on the maximum gross tonnage for cargo ships. There are fuel pipelines to take oil from coast to coast and load it up on tankers on the other side. In fact, lots of Alaska oil passed through those pipelines in the 1980s. There is a modern railroad with spurs that run right up to the dock to load containers for the quick journey across the country. There also is a fleet of tractor-trailer rigs to haul a few containers at a time. For the past two years, the new, expanded locks that run parallel to the original canal are equipped to accept new “neopanamax” ships up to 1,450 feet long. The largest ships can haul more than 13,000 containers at a time.
Even if you’ve read about the canal and its history, the scale of the project is bigger than any other project I’ve seen, even our very own trans-Alaska pipeline.
For example, I thought our ship, at 174 feet, was pretty big. Well, we had to “share” our lock time with another freighter who sailed in front of us. The original locks are designed for ships up to 960 feet. The “MTM Gibralter” is a chemical tanker flying a Singapore flag. At 462 feet, it was headed up to Texas. With both of our ships in the lock, there still was plenty of room.