MIGHTY SERVANT 1 is now approaching the entrance of the Panama Canal about 11 hours later than originally planned.
Quite when she will transit the canal is anyone's guess without seeing the running order which is unfortunately no longer published.
Every vessel, without exception, has to board a Canal pilot and so the first indication of an impending transit will be the arrival of a pilot vessel alongside.
MIGHTY SERVANT 1 is too wide to use the original canal locks and so will use the new longer and wider locks that opened in 2016.
The pilot will board the ship and she will then head towards the first set of locks, the Agua Clara locks. These locks have 3 consecutive chambers which will lift the ship 85 feet up to the level of Gatun Lake.
Once in Gatun Lake the ship will sail through Gatun Lake along a marked channel towards the narrowest part of the canal at Culebra Cut. Whereas most of the canal is wide enough for 2 way traffic, here it is one-way only for wide vessels. This choke point determines whether the ship will have to wait in Gatun Lake or not.
At the Pacific end of the canal the ship will enter the Cocoli locks to be lowered down to the level of the Pacific Ocean via another 3 chambers.
The Panama Canal provides a shortcut for shipping travelling from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and vice-versa. Instead of having to route to the south of South America and then back up, a distance of about 10,000 nm the canal offers a mere 51 mile transit. This comes at a big (well into 6 figures USD) price, calculated by a complicated formula, designed to maximise revenue to the canal operators. The original canal opened in 1914 and was an immediate success. In the first year it handled about 1000 ships and by 2008 it was handling nearly 15,000. These figures alone don’t tell the whole story because ships were getting bigger and bigger and one of the limits to the size of ships being built was the size of the locks in the Panama Canal. Ships that were built to fit (just) into the locks were described as Panamax ships. That is why so many cruise ships, container ships and car carriers are 32.3m wide and have a draft of under 12.6m. MIGHTY SERVANT 1 is 190m long and 50m wide.
The expansion of global trade and the increase in shipping meant that the canal was becoming a bottleneck with frequent delays and queues of ships waiting to transit. Fees for queue jumping became ever more expensive and ever more necessary to avoid delays. Alternatives to the canal were seriously being considered eg the NW passage and a number of alternative canal routes that avoided Panama completely. Panama relies on the income from the canal and could not afford for any of the alternatives plans to be viable and so the plan for the expansion to the existing canal system was commenced in 2007 and completed in 2016. This introduced two new sets of locks built parallel to the existing locks. Significantly, they now allow ships up to 366m long, 55m wide and with a draft of up to 15m to transit the canal. The new locks are of a modern design which use less water and are regarded as safer and more reliable too.
So a Panamax ships will use the old locks - Miraflores, Pedro Miguel and Gatun locks to transit whereas bigger ships have to use the new locks at Cocoli and Agua Clara.
The canal is big business and so is generally a pretty slick operation entirely dependent on how much you have paid. Ships are normally booked in several weeks in advance. Delays of more than 24 hours are rare and normally we can expect the ships to start their booked transit within 6 hours or so and be in the Pacific around 8 hours later.
There are webcams at the locks so you can watch the ships going through. The link to the webcams are
here (I'm having a problem with the Cocoli camera which appears to have been disturbed) There are plenty of youtube videos and documentaries on the canal, its operation and construction, many of which are very good.
Thanks to
@Mister J for providing the above graphic.
