On Wednesday we crossed the Panama Canal. What a cool experience! In preparation for our passage, there was a speaker on board who gave a brief overview of the history of the canal and the engineering marvel that it is. In terms of its history, given its strategic location and narrow isthmus, the site of the Panama Canal was of interest to many countries quite early on. As far back as the 1500s the King of Spain ordered a survey for a sea route that would cut through that area. In the late 1700s, a Spaniard named Alessandro Malaspina outlined plans for construction of a canal, though that didn’t go anywhere. France began work on the canal in 1881 but was unable to make a successful passage. They overly tried to replicate the Suez Canal (a sea-level canal), but the vastly different terrain of Panama wouldn’t allow that. Combine that with the huge death toll from excavation work and disease (primarily malaria and yellow fever) and the French attempt essentially flopped. In 1903, the United States stepped in, helping Panama to become separate from Colombia and securing the rights to build the canal. The United States had successfully built the Panama Railway across the isthmus in 1850 and now wanted a chance to create a sea passage to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Construction began in 1904 and part of the efforts included building and rebuilding better working and living conditions for the workers (something this I-O psychologist loved reading about). They made intensive efforts to install mosquito netting and kill the buggers, efforts that resulted in the mosquito-spread diseases that had plagued earlier efforts being nearly eliminated. To be clear, the work was still dangerous and deaths – about 5,600 – still occurred in the form of disease and accidents – but it was a huge step forward. 

The final canal design is the one that is in operation today. It consists of a series of locks that required the excavation of more than 13 million cubic meters of material beyond that which was already excavated earlier by the French. In 1914, a decade after the U.S. started its construction efforts, the canal was completed. The US maintained control of the canal until 1977 when they had joint control with Panama over the canal. Since 1999, the Panama Canal has been managed and operated entirely by the Panamanian government. 

The canal itself and the engineering behind it is just as fascinating as its history. The canal consists of artificial lakes, channels, and three sets of locks. When crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific (as we did), you first encounter the Gatun Locks, which are a three-stage flight of locks about 1.25 miles long that lifts ships roughly 87 feet from the sea level of the ocean to the height of Gatun Lake. The locks are essentially a water elevator where the ship enters, water fills and you slowly rise (you can’t even feel it – you have to be looking at a reference point to realize you’re moving). You then move to the next chamber/lock and go up again. Once you’re through those locks, you cross Gatun Lake, a 15-mile artificial lake that takes ships to the waterway, then through the Culbera Cut (the area that slices through the mountain ridge), then to another lock that begins the descent. This lock – the Pedro Miguel Lock – drops the ships 31 feet. After that you go a little over a mile across Miraflores Lake until you reach the final locks – the Miraflores Locks that take the ships the final 54 feet descent back to sea level. 

Our ship arrived near the start of the locks around 8am and we completed our passage of the 48-mile stretch at around 4pm. At the start of the journey, excitement was high on deck. Everybody was crowding near the front of the ship on the 10^th deck (the deck above the pool, outdoors) to see us enter the locks. It was cool to see a huge carrier ship immediately in front of us and see it rise in the lock. In the other lane was an oil tanker that was heading in the opposite direction (from the Pacific to the Atlantic) so we also got to see it lowering as it got closer to our lock.

There isn’t much space on either side of the ship – and ours was a smaller ship. Imagine how very little space there is on either side of a tanker!

An interesting nugget is that there are pilots who get on each ship and take over to navigate the ships through the canal. Apparently, the ship has to sign a waiver that if anything happens to the ship, they’re not responsible. And if the canal is damaged (by THEIR pilots) then the ship will pay for the damage. And all money to pass through the canal is done in cash – thousands upon thousands of dollars in cash! But it’s the only passage so it’s not as if there is much choice, so the ships / companies just say okay and sign the waiver, hand over the cash, and proceed with the rules at hand.

To help guide the ships there are “mules” – little trains that run along tracks and help keep the ships from shifting around while they go through the canal. As you enter the locks, the ships pass over some ropes and they are tied to the mules and secured for the length of the locks. It was funny to occasionally see people carrying the ropes (instead of the mules) because it made it look as if people were tugging the ships along when in fact that obviously wasn’t the case.

Another cool thing to see firsthand were the doors to the locks. They are massive beasts – necessary to hold all the water. Each set of gates are doubled so that if one set of gates fails the other one can hold firm since total failure would wreak absolute chaos. The gates, although massive, are hollow so they are shockingly able to be opened and closed by two relatively small motors. Actually, they can be opened and closed by just one of the motors – though it would be much slower than when both are working.

Once we went through the Gatun Locks and began navigating Gatun Lake, people dispersed, though chatter was all about the passage. In addition to the pilot who boarded the ship to see the ship through the canal, there was also a tour guide from the Panama Canal Authority who boarded and provided commentary during the day, letting us know various facts about the canal, its history, its structure, and so forth. For example, when we passed a black lighthouse, he pointed it out and noted that it used to be white, but that it was interfering with communication transmissions. They couldn’t just get rid of it since a lighthouse is important, so they painted it black and the problems went away.

When we began to near the end of our transit and got close to the locks at the end, crowds gathered again. We kept bouncing back and forth between the front and the back of the ship so we could see how it was entering the locks and exiting them. At the final set of locks – the Miraflora Locks – there were spectators on land watching us make the crossing. We agreed that we would much rather have the experience we were having – going through the canal firsthand than to have our experience be one on land watching ships go through it. It was fun to see people in stadium seating, as if they were watching a sporting event.

After the final set of locks, we were once again at sea level, in the Pacific Ocean now. It was a long day, but so much shorter of a trip than it would have taken had the Panama Canal never been created. It made us grateful to all the people who worked hard and to those who lost their lives in constructing the canal, because having to head around the southside of South America, although a fun adventure in itself, would not have been nearly as convenient as this was. Oh – and fun thing – when we got back to our room, we each had a certificate commemorating our voyage through the Panama Canal. Again, what a cool experience. I definitely recommend it to anybody considering such a trip.