Last summer when we were on a different cruise through Alaska, our friends Dan & Amanda mentioned that they had booked a cruise through the Panama Canal and invited us to come along. Like visiting Alaska, this sounded like a unique experience that would be best experienced on a cruise. The cruise that Dan and Amanda found was with Windstar – where you cruise on a large yacht with only about 150 passengers.
Fast forward a bit, and here we are having traversed the Panama Canal on a ship! I’ll share the mechanics of crossing the canal along with the wild friends we met along the way.
If you’re interested in more of the historical details of the Panama Canal, David McCullough’s The Path Between The Seas is a great historical book. The canal is essentially a stairway over the high part of Panama for ships. It uses 3 sets of locks as staircases up and down. Vessels need to rise to 85 feet above sea level and descend back down again.
We spent our first night on the ship at port just outside of the canal entrance.
 |
| Bridge near the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal entry |
While taking in the views from our ship, we noticed a steady stream of butterflies heading north in what clearly appeared to be a migration. As I mentioned in my first post from Panama there are over 1000 known species of butterfly in Panama. I was able to tell that these were black swallowtails and Alek thought he glimpsed a bit of blue on them. But they were moving quickly and not landing so it was very hard to snap photos of them. On reviewing my photos I did manage to get one though. The butterfly is not what the camera was focused on, but I happened to notice it the photo.
As we traversed the canal I asked the ship’s naturalist, Diego, if he knew what these butterflies were. He identified them as Urania Fulgens who are now migrating to Costa Rica. According to
Wikipedia, this is actually a day flying moth. A quick search turned up
results indicating that these moths only migrate once every 4-8 years, so we were lucky to experience this during our trip.
We also saw lots of Magnificent Frigate Birds while at the port in Colón. These are large fishing birds, females have a white breast and males have a red breast. Magnificent Frigate Birds were quite common around the Panama Canal.
 |
| A female Northern Frigate Bird soaring above the port in Colón |
The next morning, we were off to traverse the canal. We entered the canal from the Atlantic side of the canal which is north of the Pacific side. The canal moves vessels in a mostly north to south (or south to north) direction rather than east to west.
As we made our way toward the first set of locks we passed by some Royal Terns fishing for breakfast.
 |
| It turns out its a bit hard to capture photos of moving birds on a moving ship, this tern is a little blurrier than I’d like. |
As we got closer to the locks, we saw lots of Turkey Vultures and Black Vultures perched along the bank of the canal and soaring through the sky.
 |
| A Black Vulture perched on a tree |
 |
| Vultures soaring over the canal |
We also got to see some Red-Winged Parrots flying through the trees. At this point I’d attached my 2x extender to my camera so many of my photos including my parrot photos were a bit too blurry to post. After reviewing the photos, I removed the extender for later photos. Alek managed to get a nice shot of a pair of parrots flying together.
 |
| Alek got a great photo of parrots in flight. My photos were a bit to fuzzy to use. |
 |
| Great Kiskadee on top of a buoy |
Transiting the locks is quite involved. Captains who work for the canal board ships and are responsible for taking them through the entire canal. Before we came into the locks, we the canal crew boarded our ship to get us through.
As we got close we noticed little locomotives on each side of the locks along with gates that were opening up to allow our entrance.
When we got closer to the locomotives, crew from our ship tossed a rope over to folks standing near the locomotive. The workers who caught the rope then attached it to the locomotives. We learned that these locomotives are called “mules” because they do the work that mules would have done in other canals, although the Panama Canal has never used mules.
These mules would be with us through the lock system. They are responsible for steering the ship with the captain giving orders from the ship. The folks driving the mules communicate using bells and don’t actually speak via radio at all. Our ship had four mules, but larger vessels would have more.
After we entered the lock and the gates were closed, the water level was raised to get us up the first step. This would happen three times to get us up the the 85 foot level of Gatun Lake. In this photo you can see the water level of our lock is much higher than the lock that the ship behind us was entering.
There were lots of birds around the canal structures. This female Great-tailed Grackle was eating by the mule tracks, getting every last bite in before flying away as the mule got dangerously close.
We continued to see many vultures throughout our canal transit. This Turkey Vulture was soaring near another of the bridge crossings over the canal.
 |
| Two birds on the canal building structure |
I managed to capture a shot of a vulture carrying a lizard! Poor lizard.
There is a dredger attached to an extensive pipe system in Lake Gatun, this is to keep the Lake depth so that ships can continue to pass through. You can see the yellow pipes on the right side of the photo. The dredger is around the corner.
After the lake, we needed to go through two more sets of locks to bring us down to the same level as the Pacific Ocean. As we finished our transit through the Panama Canal our mule driver waved goodbye.
We saw many more birds in the bay after exiting the final lock system. The sea birds perched on buoys and were active near some of the ships as well.
 |
| Some sea birds resting on a buoy |
 |
| A Magnificent Frigate Bird soaring with an open mouth |
 |
| A Royal Tern flying near the canal bank |
 |
| Anhinga perched on a buoy |
 |
| Fishing Gulls |
 |
| Laughing Gull soaring above the water |
The Panama Canal crew left our ship via tug buts that docked with the ship while it was moving and then we passed under the Bridge of the Americas into the Pacific Ocean. The next day we returned to the Miraflores Locks welcome center to get a view from land and learn more about the locks. I’ll post more about in my next post!
 |
| Heading out of the canal toward the Bridge of the Americas |
