After 21 days at sea crossing the Pacific, we finally anchored offshore Balboa at 00:24 hours January 30th.

The Captain did a masterful job of jockeying the ship to find the best seas, best currents and best wind. End result, after three weeks at sea, we arrived within 1 hour of our scheduled arrival time. Pretty good seamanship from my point of view.

And the added benefit of the route he chose was sunny skies, warm weather and lots of sun for the entire three weeks. The pool was filled almost every day, and Jean got the best tan of her life. I am not much of a sun worshiper, so have a nice farmers tan.

I must admit, after three weeks at sea, we were going kind of stir crazy for a change in routine. That was one mighty big ocean.

I stayed up until we arrived at anchor in Balboa, not wanting to miss anything, but Jean had gone to bed. The Captain advised us that there would be a two hour delay while we cleared customs etc. so I went down to get a quick nap, feeling certain I would feel the ship start to move whenever the time came.

Next thing I knew it was 7am and we had already passed through the first set of locks at Miraflores. It was dark, so I would not have gotten many good photos anyway, but I was annoyed at sleeping through the first portion of our transit. Actually I was more than annoyed but will not put my exact words into the blog so as to avoid x-rating the posting.

When the sun rose we were already in the Gaillard Cut. Enough earth was excavated to cut the canal through the rainforest of Panama, that if you put it all onto railroad flatcars, they would stretch around the earth....4 times! The Gaillard Cut is 14 kilometers long and was cut through rock and rock hard clay of the Continental Divide.

Our transit of the canal was very fast. We had no delays at any of the locks, and whisked through the entire canal by 12:00 noon. (started at 3:15 am, or so I'm told!!)

It was an entirely different experience than the Suez Canal, and I can't really try to compare them.

The birds were singing merrily from the rainforest on both sides of the Cut as we sailed through. The expanse of Gatun Lake was very beautiful and relaxing. The weather was hot, humid and sunny all day, and we both got burns on our foreheads and faces from standing/sitting on deck all morning watching the transit. That despite the good base we already had. The sun was pretty intense, but you did not notice the effect due to the nice breeze always blowing over the deck.

I got lots of photos and videos of our transit through the 3 locks of the Gatun Locks. It was impressive to watch, and quite an engineering marvel for 1913 (when it was constructed). The entire canal is gravity fed, no pumps whatsoever. The ships rise or fall 26 meters between sea level and Gatun Lake. We enjoyed waving at the bus loads of tourists at the Gatun Locks visitors centre. They may have had a good view, but we had the greatest view of them all.

At 12:00 noon we entered the Caribbean Sea at Colon and set course northwest for Puerto Limon Costa Rica, our final stop before Houston.

Interestingly enough, the swell in the Caribbean was worse than the entire Pacific crossing, and the ship was rolling 10 degrees to port and starboard for most of the afternoon. We passed through several heavy rain squalls which helped wash all the encrusted salt off the ship from our 3 weeks at sea.