Next month, close friends of ours are going through the Panama Canal, on the Celebrity Constellation…west to east, San Diego to Fort Lauderdale. This is a good idea. Last spring, we made that trip in reverse, more or less, and it was one of our favorite cruises ever.
That sentiment is spreading, and not just because you’re reading it here at Cruising Done Right. By the end of the current winter season next May, more than 250 cruise ships will have taken passengers through the Canal.
Some will stop and make shore excursions and some, like us, will just see the Canal from the balcony or the deck.
The point is, it’s popular. Not only that, it’s going to get more popular for the next few years.
In 2014, the Canal will turn 100 years old. By then, it will have had a facelift, something that’s being called a “new canal” but something that in reality is new locks that will be large enough to accommodate bigger ships. How big? About 65% larger than the existing locks (Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side, and San Miguel and Miraflores Locks on the Pacific). This will not only accommodate the biggest cruise ships but, more importantly, the biggest cargo ships.
The new locks will run parallel to the old, but are more environmentally friendly, using 7% less water and recycling 60% of the water back into basins instead of just flushing it out to sea.
The line-up for getting through the Canal was so bad two years ago that they auctioned off the chance to be first in line. One report was that BP Shipping paid over $200,000 for the No. 1 spot, rather than wait in line, sometimes for weeks at an operational cost of $40,000 a day.
For almost a century, the Panama Canal has been an engineering marvel. It’s about 50 miles long…most of the 50 miles is Gatun Lake, which connects the locks that open up into the two oceans. It runs at almost 90% capacity and has a tough time keeping up with the shipping needs of today. It has become a bottleneck. The expansion of the two locks with more modern technology — at a cost of $5.25 billion — became a necessity, and soon will become even more of a tourist attraction than it already is.
Expect cruise lines to feature the “new canal” in marketing cruises that are already attractive, in our opinion — we’d go again in a heartbeat. Make no mistake…this is not being done for cruise ships. Holland America, Princess, Royal Caribbean and Celebrity send ships through it now. Cunard (the Queen Elizabeth) and Disney (the Wonder’s inaugural cruise) will in 2011. Perhaps the Oasis of the Seas, Allure and Epic will in the future.
Even if you err on the high side and predict 300 cruise-ship crossings in a year, there are currently 14,000 ships crossing the Isthmus of Panama.
That makes cruise ships about 2% of the total.