Not every cruise we take has a special reason for taking it. We’ve taken plenty over the years that were just to have a break – which is reason enough – but we’ve also enjoyed ticking off new travel achievements when we can and this Ruby Princess cruise gave us a chance to make a full transit of the Panama Canal, which is what we now got to do.
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.