Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Panama Travelog #29
Panama City, Panama - Sat, 28 Dec 2024. 12pm.

Today we toured the Panama Canal. We booked a half-day ferry excursion that took us from the Pacific Ocean to approximately the midpoint of the canal, at Gamboa. There are 6 locks from end to end, 3 up and 3 down in each direction. Our ferry ascended through 3 locks then docked. Following that we rode a bus back to Panama City.

It was an early day. We set alarms for 4:45am to be out the door at 5:30am to report to the marina at 6am for check-in and boarding. The day started even earlier for me as my body decided at around 2:15am that it really didn't want more sleep. I sat up for 2.5 hours until our alarms rang.

Once at the marina things moved smoothly. Smoothly doesn't mean swiftly, though. One of the things our tour guides on the ship explained is that ships first wait an average of 8-10 hours at either end for the signal from authorities to begin transit, then a full transit through the canal takes 10-12 hours. So, going from ocean to ocean is a 24 hour process. Though that is quite swift compared to having to sail around Cape Horn at the tip of South America.



Continuing with my resolution to avoid backlogging I will share just one photo from this amazing and information-packed trip. This pic shows the ship ahead of us, a car carrier that can hold 3,000 cars, entering one of the locks at Miraflores. We followed it through each of the locks. There was room for both ships.

Note the tugboat in the foreground. It helped guide the freighter into the narrow lock. By narrow I mean that the there is less than 1 foot of clearance on each side of the freighter.

There are also electric locomotives, two on each side of the lock. You can see their rails in the picture. These "mules", as they're called, attach steel cables to large ships fore and aft to pull, push, and guide them through the locks. We didn't have mules attached to our ship because we're narrow enough to fit easily. That car carrier fits in the locks with less than 1' of clearance on each side.

These are the original locks that were designed in 1904 and completed in 1914. The reason ships like this barely fit in the locks is because they're designed that way. For decades freighter ships have been designed specifically to fit through the Panama Canal locks that have been operating for just over 110 years now.

Alaska Travelog #13
Asea in Kenai Fjords NP - Sun, 16 Jun 2024, 2:45pm

Remember how I quipped that cruising around in the ice floe at the foot of Northwest Glacier was like floating in the world's largest margarita? Well, while all of us passengers were topside taking pictures of the mountains, glaciers, icy bay, and wildlife, one of the crew was belowdecks chopping up a chunk of floating ice he'd hauled up from the water. And as we steamed away out of the bay, the bar was definitely open... for glacier-itas!



This "glacierita" is a margarita made with chunks of glacial ice. It does somehow taste better than a regular terrestrial margarita made with chunks of ice that are merely hours, or maybe days, old rather than centuries old. Maybe it's the glacial flour. Or maybe it's just taste amplification from the amazing scenery. Whatever it is, it's good enough that I'll have two. 🤣

Alaska Travelog #11
Asea in Kenai Fjords NP - Sun, 16 Jun 2024, 11am

I've got to hand it to him— our cruise captain MacGyvered a fix for the engine problem that was hobbling the ship. It turned out seaweed had gotten into the coolant intake pipe and made it past the filter. The ship's engines use sea water as coolant. Seaweed got wrapped around the impeller, which is like a rapidly spinning gear cog that pulls water through the pipe, causing it to overheat and start to break down. This further caused too little cool water to reach the engines, causing them to start to overheat. There were replacement impeller wheels aboard the ship— the first mate explained that carrying a variety of replacement parts for hot-swaps at sea is standard when I expressed surprise— but the captain also had to improvise tools to pull the seaweed out of the long supply pipe. Well, long story short, we were under way again about an hour after the problem first appeared.

The captain pushed on ahead to Spire Cove to help make up for lost time. Normally he might have gone slower looking for aquatic wildlife, but we'd already seen a lot. There was a bald eagle right at the marina and playful otters just outside that. Then we saw humpback whales, too. The video I tried capturing of them didn't turn out well. But hey, I was talking about Spire Cove....


Link: watch video on YouTube

Spire Cove is interesting for the tall, rocky spires jutting up from the sea. This is a situation where the morning's foggy weather was both good and bad. It was bad because it foiled long-distance views and muted out the colors around us. Those colors would've been striking in the sun, especially with all those wildflowers and trees improbably growing atop the spires. The good side of the fog was that it created a certain aura of mystery around the spires.

Will the fog lift by the time we get to the glaciers? I certainly hope so, because that's a place where long-distance views absolutely will count, and I want to see the glaciers. For me that's the number-one reason to spend the time and money on this cruise.

The crew says that this fog is a convective fog. It's caused by warm air over cold water. Yesterday was an extremely warm day for Alaska— we enjoyed 74° highs up in Anchorage! So now this is like our punishment for having such a nice day yesterday. 😧

Grand Cayman Travelog #8
Starfish Point, Grand Cayman - Tue, 16 May 2023, 4pm

After swimming with the stingrays we got to the part of the trip I had most been looking forward to this afternoon: snorkeling. Except by the time we got to the snorkeling reef I already knew I wasn't going in the water. 😱 I'd donned a snorkeling mask back at the stingray scrum to practice snorkeling, and I got something in my eye. It was so painful that my eye was watering constantly and I couldn't deal with anything being placed on, over, or near it for at least a few hours.

I stayed on the boat while everyone else went in the water. My consolation prize was the guides opened the bar for me. There was a bar on the boat, and the rule was "No booze until ya're done wit' snorkeling". Well, I was done.

I did get a chance to get back in the water at our final stop, Starfish Point. The boat anchored within about 50' of shore, and the water was only 2' deep. There were bunches of starfish in the shallow water. We also found a sea cucumber and a friendly jellyfish. "Friendly" in this case was that it was sort of floating upside down, its stinging tentacles on top. We took turns holding it from underneath. While we were exchanging expressions of surprising at how we could touch it without being stung, a colleague of mine who speaks several European languages explained that in every language he knows except English, a jellyfish is called basically a Medusa. That is... way more apropos and far less stupid than jelly fish.

As for the starfishes? I took video of a few other people and myself playing with them. My videos turned out damaged, though. It'll take me a while to see if I can salvage anything worthwhile or get a better quality pics/video from a friend.

Update: we went back to Starfish Point Friday, on our own. I posted a new journal entry with great pictures and video from Starfish Point.