Panama Canal

To watch 60,000 tons effortlessly move up 55 feet is quite something. We spent a few hours watching ships move through the Pedro Miguel locks and were pleased to be the only gringos.

The next morning we went to Miraflores locks, one of the largest due to the magnitude of the Pacific tides. We paid the $5 to climb 4 (air-conditioned) flights of stairs to the observation platform. This gave us an amazing vantage point to see both flights of the locks, or esclusas in Spanish, as a large container ship moved through, and UP 55 feet.

Read the Wikipedia info for more details, but the jist of it is they close the 7 story, 662 ton gates and then dump 26.7 million U.S. gallons into the thousand foot long lock. They do this twice at Miraflores to raise the ship the 55 feet. The hinges on the doors weigh 17 tons each! And, the only pump used is a 25hp hydraulic motor to move the gates back and forth as the water is gravity fed. The water culverts are large enough to drive a train through and move the 30 million gallons in 8 minutes. Needless to say, we were both very sun burnt by the time I had had enough of watching this amazing marvel of engineering.

The Mitsubishi mules run on a cogged track and have winches for the lines. They only guide the ship through and the clearance between the ship and the lock made me think those guys knew what the were doing. There were 6 mules on the ships we watched, 4 up front and 2 in the back.

It all looked like a choreographed John Travolta movie, and even the guys on the ships looked like they were enjoying it, lots of waving in both directions.