So we had another sea day effectively, and there had already been a fair few of them which doesn’t make for the most thrilling of updates here. What was new and exciting to share? Not a lot. There was an event right at the end of the night that raised eyebrows (and tempers) so scroll to the bottom for details of that, but otherwise prepare yourself mostly for some photos of the top deck of Ruby Princess.

The morning view from our balcony reminded us of departing Singapore on our very first cruise and being mesmerised by the huge numbers of oil and cargo containers just lined up at anchor. Here at the entrance to the Panama Canal (which we’d be heading through the following day) was a similar sight.

The day’s weather was one of intense periods of rain followed by searing heat that almost immediately dried everything out but surrounded the ship in an invisible cloud of dense humidity, none of which were things my wife wanted to be out in so I left her in the air conditioned interior of the cruise ship after breakfast while I took a quick look around the top deck.

The miniature golf course on Ruby Princess was a huge upgrade to the equivalent spaces we’d seen on other Princess Cruises ships over the years, with those areas more-or-less accurately described as green surfaces with holes in them. Here there were actual obstacles and proper layouts, and if it hadn’t been quite so hot and my wife had been there while I was shooting the photos then I might even have persuaded her to join me for a round.

The sports court area looked like it had also benefitted from the dry dock changes on Ruby Princess that had immediately preceded our cruise.

The afternoon was spent back in our cabin when we needed to cool down or out on the balcony when we wanted to brave the heat and humidity. We make it a point to always try to book these deck 10 balcony cabins on Grand-class ships because of these double-depth, half-covered balconies. The deck below has equally large balconies but the rooms are larger so the balconies there are fully exposed to the elements and have no privacy (not that that’s really an issue), whereas our deck’s balconies offer protection from the sun, rain, and anyone looking down from above (again, not an issue, and I pity anyone looking down on us) while also giving better night views of stars. If the people around turn their balcony lights off, that is. Many don’t. A big annoyance.

In the early evening Ruby Princess started to move away from her anchorage spot near Panama City to a more distant location and the reason for this was so limit the city’s exposure to any noise from the deck party that had suddenly been arranged to make up for the change in cruise plans.

The Ruby Princess deck party featured the resident party band belting out tracks people could sing along and dance to, the staff dancing and encouraging others to join them, everyone having a generally good time, and us loving the ambience but keeping out of the way of most it. It was wonderful to have it all take place in cooler evening temperatures and the almost exclusive use of blue and purple lighting gave the occasion a pleasing look to accompany the happy atmosphere.

For the rest of the evening on the ship it was mostly business as usual with some pre-dinner cocktails, then food in the main dining room – it was Italian Night on Ruby Princess and the dinner menu is below for you to look at – then a little lounge-hopping until hitting the nightclub.

In Skywalkers it was nice to see some of the ship’s officers make an appearance to dance for a few tracks. They were, of course, treated to the DJ’s standard, small selection of music, but as they’d not heard them every night of the cruise they seemed to enjoy themselves before leaving.

Now to that incident I mentioned at the start of this write-up.

A couple of people we’d not seen before were standing by the dance floor when we decided we’d had enough and were going to head off to bed. Just as we were passing them there was a lull in the music volume enough for me to hear the man tell his wife “I wish he’d play some Led Zeppelin.”

“Good luck with that,” I felt compelled to say to him. “He won’t play anything anyone asks for. We’ve tried.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that!” he said, and headed off to the booth. We stood there and spoke to his wife for a couple of minutes on the off-chance that he’d have some success where we hadn’t, then glanced back. What we could see was the man who’d gone to talk to the DJ leaning across and jabbing his finger towards the dick with the discs. The next second the music stopped, the lights came up, and the DJ shouted into his microphone “No, no that’s it! No more! Security!”

The man returned to us. “That guy is a fucking prick!” he said, gestured to his wife, then left.

I headed to the DJ with the intention of smoothing things over. “Hey, I don’t know what was said and I hope you’re okay but I’m sure whatever was said was just in the heat of the moment,” I said. “I won’t take that from anyone,” the DJ said to me. “Someone else threatened me and yesterday someone punched me and they’re being kicked off the ship so I won’t be told what to do!”

I told the DJ I was sorry to hear that, explained what had happened to some bar staff who’d come across by now to see what was happening, then nodded to my wife and we left.

People who say that violence is never the answer haven’t paid attention to history where it’s been shown many times that it’s precisely the answer and is often very effective. No, I don’t advocate passengers hitting staff members, of course, but it was not difficult to guess what had probably led to someone else doing it given the experiences we’d had with this godawful DJ to this point too.

Who says sea days can’t be exciting!?

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series Ruby Princess, with us aboard, will make a full transit of the Panama Canal.

When we awoke in the morning we had just passed under the Bridge of the Americas (so we missed that) and were on the slow approach to the Cocoli Locks, part of the Panama Canal expansion project undertaken in the 2010s to double transit capacity between the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the Americas. These locks, like those we’d be exiting on the Atlantic side later in the day, comprised three chambers with basins and rolling gates, filled and emptied by gravity, and making use of tugboats to position ships rather than trains (called mules) as used in the older lock systems.

I’d describe the process of passing through the locks and being raised or lowered as technically interesting but not that fascinating overall, and that’s mainly because it just happens so slowly that you don’t really get a sense that anything is really happening. You can look ahead from the balcony (if you’re on one) and spot the gates closing or opening, but it’s mostly a case of simply waiting until you start to move again. It took a little over ninety minutes for us to get through the Cocoli Locks and enter the canal.

We then cruised quietly and slowly along the waterway for about two and half hours passing close to verdant landscapes either side all under close, cloudy skies and in hot, humid conditions.

We’d already cruised under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco at the start of this cruise and we got to cruise under another three bridges during this Panama Canal transit. We’d got up just too late to see our passage beneath the Bridge of the Americas at the entrance to the canal locks but we were wide awake as we made our way past the Centennial Bridge. The bridge is named for Panama’s centennial which occurred in 2003 and it was officially opened in August 2004.

Gatun Lake was formed in 1913 by damming the Chagres River and at the time it was the largest artificial lake in the world. It was here that Ruby Princess and several other vessels waited for a time slot to open in which to pass through the second set of locks. During this four-hour period the rain came in and with the small islands and reduced visibility we were reminded a little of our approach to Ha Long Bay a few years earlier.

Eventually, though, the tug boats started coming alongside once more to guide our cruise ship into the Agua Clara Locks. The process here was identical to that of the locks we’d passed through at the start of the day although it took a bit longer than the morning’s transit at around two and a quarter hours.

By the time we completed our Panama Canal full transit the sun had set. This did mean that we had the additional enjoyment of seeing the Atlantic Bridge showing off a light display as we cruised underneath. The Atlantic Bridge is the third permanent crossing over the Panama Canal waterway and was only completed in 2019.

If I were to compare our experiences cruising between the two most famous canals in the world then I’d probably say that our time cruising through the Suez Canal provided us with more interesting sights, and that may simply be because the desert landscape was far more unfamiliar to us. That said, we completely missed any lock activity when doing the Suez transit so this trip through the Panama Canal was technically more interesting.

In the next post in this travelogue series we’ll be visiting the only new country for us on this cruise when we arrive at Cartagena, Colombia.