CANAL TRANSIT, Part 6, Gamboa Area

The project to deepen the Canal in the Carpenter Hill area, where MINDI is working isn't as easy as starting up the pumps and sucking up the bottom. Ahead of the suction dredge and its revolving cutting head is BARU.

BARU is a Drill Boat or Drilling Barge. The site I consulted says it is either 52 meters (169 feet) or maybe 326 feet long, fifteen meters wide, its towers are 33 meters high. It has no propulsion power. It was built in 2009 specifically to perform submarine drilling and blasting on the deepening and widening project. Its job is to loosen the material on the sides and bottom so the dredges can pick it up or suck it up and remove it.

The next point of interest is behind the railroad bridge. The Chagres River is the source of the water to operate the Canal and to keep Gatun Lake full.

I couldn't easily find any volume data. This river, however, is what (along with sickness and disease) thwarted the Frenchman de Lessep's plan to dig a sea level Canal modeled after his Suez Canal. His engineers couldn't figure out how to cope with the very large volume of water carried by the Chagres during the rainy season. The working plan was that the Canal would have to be closed during these high water times. The rainy season is about eight months of the year. In the end, the French were defeated before the river itself could defeat them.

Not far north of the mouth of the Chagres River, is the town (?) of Gamboa. About all you can see of this town is what is in this photograph plus some storage yards a little farther north.
This is where the Partial Transit folks get off the boat and onto a bus for the ride back to Panama City. The entire group of transitors aboard the Islamorada got off at Gamboa because it only makes partial transits.
The Islamorada was built and christened Santana in Boston in 1912 and was a state of the art pleasure boat with a 1,000 hp gasoline fueled engine, six staterooms, fine crew quarters, and other modern conveniences. It was once owned by Al Capone. We were told it was brought to Panama by some movie star and was also owned by Steve McQueen. Those two points are not easy to verify but it is reported that it was brought to Panama in 1960. So, if you want to be added to the list of previous owners, you will probably not get an argument as long as you relinquish title sometime soon after about 1970.

Meanwhile, back to barges and dredging. The last photo here is of a clam shell bottomed barge and its tugboat tender, Gamboa. This barge, that has no name, and others just like it, are loaded by shovel front excavators or track hoes, "towed" (meaning pushed or pulled) to sea, and the clam shell doors opened to drop the load. I suppose there are permits required and specific locations designated where the material is dropped.
The new locks project calls for the channel through the Gaillard Cut to be deepened from about 43 feet to about 70 feet, and widened from whatever it is now to about 215 meters (about 700 feet) except right at Contractor Hill where the width will remain about what it is now.

When we left Gamboa, we left behind about half or more of our transitors. Those of us remaining didn't seem to include any of the wimpy folks who had spent their time in the cabin or under the sun shades for the first part of the transit. We were the hardy ones prepared to endure any hardship to go from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic in just a few hours.

One of the groups of transitors was an extended family partly from Los Angeles and partly from El Salvador. It consisted of a woman of about 50 and her son from Los Angeles who had flown to El Salvador where they had met her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law, and two nieces (or maybe it was her brother and sister-in-law.) They had all boarded a bus and taken a 37 hour (give or take a little) ride to Panama City. In a straight line on the map it looks like about 750 miles and you go from El Salvador to a corner of Honduras to Nicaragua to Costa Rica and finally into Panama. They had to get off the bus at each national border, show their passports and be prepared to have their baggage inspected, etc. The son, Hugo, (25, recent college graduate, unemployed, very sharp and gregarious) related that getting off the bus was really a pleasure since he got all those passport stamps, plus it was a chance to breathe. The bus bathroom was not clean and did not get cleaned during the trip. Hugo was not excited about retracing the route. They were due to go back for 37 more hours in four or five days.

JCE