Our passage started very early with the Panama Canal pilots and crew coming on board about 03:00. The crew was on board to handle the ropes and cables that are attached to the "mules" - small electric locomotives on either side of the locks that pull the ships through and hold them steady in the chambers.
After a very slow passage through the anchorage and past the other ships waiting their turns we passed under the Bridge of the Americas around 04:30 and headed to the Miraflores Locks. The lock system is very interesting, especially when one considers that it has been in operation, essentially unchanged, for about 95 years. There are three sets of locks, the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks on the Pacific side, and the Gatun locks on the Atlantic side. Ships approaching from either direction need to be raised 26 meters to the level of the Gatun Lake and then lowered again the same amount when they reach the other side.
At each lock there are two channels for ships. The ship chambers are 33.53 meters wide and 304.8 meters long which limits the size of ships transiting the canal to a maximum width of 32.3 meters and a length of no more than 294.1 meters. Our beam is 27.8 meters, so we had a bit of space on each side. The "Panamax" container ships, so called because they are built to the absolute maximum capacity the locks can manage, fit inside the chambers with only inches to spare on the sides.
At each lock the ships enter the specified channel and wait their turn to move into the chamber. At Miraflores we entered the chamber, the gates closed behind us, and we waited until the water level raised us up to the entry level for the next chamber. Ahead of us, another ship had left the second chamber and was moving into the Miraflores Lake. We waited until the water level in the vacated chamber was lowered, then the doors to the second chamber were opened and we were moved forward with the help of the mules, our engine, and a tugboat behind us. Again the doors behind us closed and the water level was raised while the level of the chamber we just left was lowered to wait for the next ship.
Transiting from the Miraflores Lake to the Gatun Lake was accomplished at the Pedro Miguel locks. Here there is only one step and the process was basically the same as before. We approached the channel, two of the shore crew rowed out to pass the lead lines for the cables, the cables from the mules were made fast by the Panama crew on our deck and we were pulled and pushed into position before the chamber was flooded and we were raised upward.
Once we passed through the Pedro Miguel locks we made the slow journey along the Gaillard, or Culebra Cut, a 13.7 kilometer long, narrow waterway that leads to the Gatun Lake and was excavated from volcanic rock and hard clay. Throughout the entire trip one of the two pilots was on deck directing our helmsman and guiding our passage. On this narrow section he would make use of a series of waypoints on shore which used a light system to ensure he was on the correct course; if the light showed green, he was correct, white or red indicated that a correction was necessary. At the exact moment, taking into account the currents and our ship's length, he would issue the rudder and engine commands that brought us safely and smoothly around each turn.
Next we passed into Gatun Lake which was created by the damming of the Chagres River. This part of the journey was about 38 kilometers long and took about four hours to complete. Here we saw the first of the ships making their way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Due to the capacity of the locks and the narrowness of the Gaillard Cut it's necessary that the traffic in both directions be carefully managed to ensure the safety of the ships. The traffic passing from the Atlantic has to be timed so that the last ship from the Pacific has exited the Gaillard Cut before the first ship from the Atlantic has completed its journey across Gatun Lake.
According to the the information provided by the Panama Canal Authority brochure, the daily capacity of the Canal is 38 ships, which at the time of printing they were hoping to increase to 45. I'll have to check their website for the latest figures. Regardless, it is a complicated system of timing and coordination to maximize the throughput. The average, total transit time, including time at anchorage, is about 18 to 24 hours. In our case the company had booked a specific time slot for our transit at considerable additional expense. It was important that we arrived on time as re-booking can be costly and time consuming, so we had burned a little extra fuel across the Pacific to guarantee our punctuality.
We arrived at the Gatun locks right on schedule at around 12:30. Here we did the reverse of the process at the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks in that we entered the chambers and were lowered to the next level. The Gatun locks contain all three chambers, one after the other, so the ships drop an impressive 26 meters in a distance of about a kilometer. It was quite a sight to glance to our stern and see a huge container ship high above us in the first chamber.
From start to finish, the movement through the Gatun locks down to the Atlantic took almost two hours. On our way through the final channel at Limon Bay we saw a couple of caymans on the shore. Shortly after that we were in the waters of the Caribbean Sea.
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