Pictures from Panama Canal Cruise October 2010
Fort Lauderdale to Panama Canal - Gatun Lake.

This article was posted on November 15, 2010.

Navigation
1) Fort Lauderdale to Panama Canal - Gatun Lake
2) Panama Canal - Gatun Lake to Balboa
3) Balboa, Panama to Santa Cruz Huatulco, Mexico
4) Acapulco, Mexico to San Diego, California

The red line shows the diversion due to the evacuation of a stricken passenger by the US Coast Guard.

About 350 miles from Aruba, a passenger fell in the bathtub and suffered a ruptured spleen. The US Coast Guard was summoned to evacuate the stricken woman to proper medical facilites. The ship reversed course and steamed North for about 3 hours to close the gap with the helicopter, so the port call in Aruba was cancelled. (The woman survived emergency surgery and is recovering.)

All passengers were moved from the front part of the ship just in case the helicopter crashed into anything while picking the patient from the bow. Note the Coast Guard rescue swimmer sitting on the ledge of the open door. Here's a video of a Coast Guard rescue from the bow of the Statendam's sister ship the Ryndam.

At dinner that night I asked a fellow passenger who'd been on about 40 cruises if she'd seen anyone leave a cruise ship in such dramatic fashion. Apparently a fews years back she'd been on a cruise when the ship mysterously made an unscheduled and unannounced stop in the far western Aleutian Islands and a passenger was hustled ashore. The next morning they read in the NY Times that a fugitive Roman Catholic priest with a long history as a pedophile had been aboard. I guess they're everywhere.

After the Coast Guard rescue, a port call in nearby Ocho Rios, Jamaica was substituted for the cancelled stop in Oranjestad, Aruba. I walked around town for 10 or 15 minutes and then returned to the ship -- not a lot going on there.

As we passed this Caribbean island of 5,000 inhabitants about 200 miles off the East coast of Nicaragua, two small boats approached the ship and collected some type of tribute. Don't know if they were pirates.

The three-stage Gatun Locks lift ocean-going vessels 85 feet in elevation from the Caribbean Sea to Gatun Lake

Another Holland America cruise ship, the Zuiderdam, is in the second stage of the left hand lock while the container ship Maersk Mytilini is in the third stage of the right hand lock. A smaller bulk carrier Anassa Ioanna is in the first stage on the right.

The two swinging arms in front of the gate are actually a roadway -- and the only way for motor vehicles to negotiate the canal on the Atlantic side. Motorists must wait up to an hour to cross.

Panama Canal operators have experimented with a number of methods (crossbows, air guns, motorized boats, etc.) to get the mooring lines of approaching vessels to the wall of the lock. But surprisingly, nothing has proved to be as efficient as two men in a row boat.

While ships move through the locks under their own power, they are tethered to these electrically-powered locomotives called "mules". The mules keep the vessel centered in the lock by maintaining tension on its mooring lines and prevent the vessel from scraping the walls of the lock. Four to eight mules accompany a vessel through the locks depending on its size.

Mule waiting for vessel to rise in first stage lock.

Notice the difference in color between the sediment-loaded freshwater from Gatun Lake that is pouring into the lock and the clear blue water of the Caribbean Sea behind the lock. A vessel consumes about 53 million gallons of freshwater to fill the locks during a full-transit of the canal. (Approximately the average daily water consumption for a city of 400,000 population.) And those locks fill quickly, at the rate of about 3 feet per minute. Even the deepest lock (the single-stage Pedro Miguel lock at 31 feet) takes only about ten minutes to fill.

Since the Statendam was more than 200 ft shorter than the length of the lock, there was room for this tugboat to join us.