Day Fifty - February 24

Today was the Daylight Transit of the canal from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea.

Our departure time from Panama City was 04:00am but I think it may have been somewhat later. Like Papeete, the ship left port with very little engine noise. I was up at 05:30 and noticed the city was now on the starboard side of the ship. Even though we left port at such a godly hour every ship must reserve a time for transit. The ship basically left port and did a slow u-turn before sailing under the Bridge of The Americas to get to the first set of locks.

The Panama Canal was a feat of engineering marvel for its time. Construction commenced in the early 1900s and completed ten years later in 1912. The total cost of the project was $400 million, a huge amount for the day. In today's dollars the project would be billions of dollars.

Each day our Cruise Director, Ray comes on to dicuss the day's activities and today he had a running commentary on previous transits of the canal. He mentioned a very sad statistic that during construction 30,000 Frenchmen died mostly from Yellow Fever. France was the original country to begin the project.

A lecturer was on board to provide continious commentary for the transit which lasted pretty much all day until 4:30pm.

The Canal is made of three locks and you make your way from the Pacific to the Caribbean Sea or vice versa. They are called Miraflores, Pedro Miguel and Gatun. Once through the second lock you are into Lake Gatun.

Ships are charged a fee based on their total tonnage and the average cost is $150,000 to transit through the canal. Here's an interesting trivia question - what is the cheapest fee ever charged to use the canal? The answer is $0.36 in 1928 by Richard Halliburton who swam the canal. The lecturer also indicated that the highest fee was in the range of $1.5 million.

The length between the two openings is 48 miles with 11,000 ships navigating the canal each year. It was mentioned that the canal generates $2 billion in revenue annually with approximately $800 million going directly into Panama's treasury. The United States of America had control of the canal for most of the 20th century but the canal's control was turned over by the US to the goverment of Panama in 1999.

The locks operate on a 24 hours basis. Construction of the third lock commenced in September 2007 and was completed in May 2016 to meet the growing demand.

A term called "mules" is used for the electric locomotives which guide the ships through the locks. The ships use their own propulsion but the mules keep the ships in the centre of the locks through the use of ropes. It is the job of two people in a row boat (see above photo) to collect the ship's rope thrown down to them, attach it to a second rope which is then pulled out of the water and attached to the locomotives. Very antiquated system however it still works.

Our trip through the locks took nearly nine hours.

Upon returning to our staterooms after dinner there was a letter from Oceania's Vice President of Guest Services confirming that St Petersburg would obviously be removed from our itinarary because of the horrible situation in Ukraine. Our heart certainly goes out to our Ukranian crew members and their families.