CANAL TRANSIT, Part 7, Gatun Lake, South End

Not far after leaving Gamboa, Gatun lake becomes a real lake. The ship channel is between banks that are constantly becoming farther and farther apart. The vegetation also appears to take on a more jungle like appearance with dense stands of many different types of trees and Tarzan vines just waiting to have someone swing on them. I guess they are the predecessor and inspiration for zip lines and bungee cords.

The first photo here is of the top deck of our tour boat. Except for a few of the more intrepid among us, most of the people were no longer standing and trying to catch every little new thing that went by. We had been on the boat for about six hours by this time. There was a contingent at the bow, including the folks from El Salvador, three guys who are salesmen for an Israeli chemical company, an Asian woman, a British woman and her companion, and us who were awaiting about every new sighting.

You do get accustomed to seeing big ships. I wouldn't have thought I would ever see a big ship and not want to know something about it and where it had been and where it was going. After seeing more ships than I had ever seen, it occurred to me that if you lived in Panama you could do what the British do in their train spotting hobby. Every ship has an easily visible name and most of the ships that use the canal are coming and going through it regularly. You could do the same for tug boats.

We saw many ships of the "bulker" variety, some with their own crane systems and some without. We saw many fuel transporters with foreign names but "No Smoking" in big letters across the front of the superstructure. We saw more car carriers. We saw big container ships (of the 5,000 container size, not the 18,000 container size which is what the new locks will accommodate.) I didn't get tired of seeing big ships but I did find myself wanting to see some different kind of big ship.

The island in the next photo is, I think, a corner of Isla Barro Colorado. It appears on the map to be about 1,500 acres. Even from the distance we were away from it when we passed, you could see there were many different kinds of trees all growing side by side. Our narrator told us there are more species of trees on this island than in all of Europe. It is hard to visualize how anyone could have walked around and counted the different species because it appears to be about as dense or even more dense than our coastal Douglas fir forests. Anyway, even though I couldn't find that factoid anywhere else, I couldn't find anything that would refute it either. I don't know either how many tree species there are in Europe, maybe only ten or twelve.

The last photo in this posting is looking back to the south at, about at the lowest point of vegetation, where the French spent much effort and time digging. There isn't really much to see, and certainly no one would, on their own, notice old shovel marks in the dirt. Also, the French were digging a sea level canal and we're about 84 feet above sea level on the Lake so most of the shovel marks are probably under water. One more thing about this last photo. The color and clarity of the water is about exactly reproduced here. In the last posting, the photo of the railroad bridge across the mouth of the Chagres River showed about the true color and clarity also. There doesn't appear to be algae or other growth in the water, more like just a huge load of silt.

JCE