When confronted by the sheer magnitude of some things in life I am often left speechless. Not for lack of vocabulary, or lack of knowledge of the structure of written language, but rather some things written seem almost paltry in comparison to the experience. I have seen grand and terrifying things in my life, but none has left me as nearly dumbfounded as the spectacle that is the Panama Canal. Granted this technology is rather old in the scheme of things, bordering on the antiquated when looking at the size of modern super tankers that share the oceans with us, but the fundamental achievement of moving a vessel through up onto what used to be land, through a jungle, then back down to a completely different ocean is a phenomenal feat of human ingenuity, bravery, and will.
Pulling into the staging area, if you will, it is basically a harbor, but the openness of it was much more so than any other harbor I have personally been in yet. We anchored up amongst the other ships, some of which overshadowed our ships nearly three hundred feet by hundreds and hundreds of feet. We were scheduled to begin our maneuvering into the canal at roughly 3:30pm ship time, as to what the local time was I am not too sure. To this day nearly four months into this internship there are two times I concern myself with, one being ship time, because lets be honest you need to know when to eat and sleep in sync with the ship, and then there is good old eastern standard time, which is the time zone basically a majority of people I know and care about reside in, and well I need to know when not to call them in the middle of the night. So any way the whole thing was set to go at 3:30pm. We were to be in the locks with another ship because by comparison our ship was so small it would have been a waste of space and resources to send it in by itself. So we set in behind the Atlantic Klipper (yes with a K because it was a Russian vessel and that is how it was spelled on the stern of the ship.) I am still not exactly sure the location of the first lock. It kind of appeared out of the aether. I was on deck while we slowly made our way toward it, we crept along at about 2 knots, maybe less. The first thing I remember seeing were the silver mules. Now these mules are actually small trains on rails, but they have kept the moniker of their predecessors, which were, well, flesh and blood mules. Anyway, I was absolutely nerdy giddy in seeing these machinations. I had heard stories about them, and had spent the better part of a week thinking about what they may look like, how they were to keep the boat alined in the middle of the channel, you know the things most people think about in their down time. I could have looked the information up on the internet and found a definitive answer in about 5 minutes, but why ruin the wonder and surprise. Why not savor the unknown. And much to my surprise they were pretty much how I pictured they might look, because well after all how many different ways can you design a small train with a wire coming out of the side.
One thing you must know is that before you pull up to the lock a crew of men, in this case there were no females who boarded our vessel, called line handlers board the ship and well handle the line that leads from the mule to the ship. The mule does not really pull the ship along, its sole purpose is to act a mobile spring line and keep the ship centered so as not to allow it to drift into the side of the lock. Some ships like the GIANT ship in the locks next to us have very little room for error, maybe a foot on either side and it is then metal against concrete, and well generally speaking the metal is going to lose that battle because the concrete is old and hardened. So you can imagine most of the time the line handlers and drivers of the mules have a rather daunting task of keeping very large vessels from moving a foot either side to side or front to back. Our small ship by comparison was probably a walk in the park for these guys. They threw a rope from our ship down to a small dingy that was rowed by one person, and another person caught our line. That line was then passed up to another individual waiting next to the mule. This person put the line through a loop in a large wire rope that was coming out of the side of the mule, tied it off, and the line handlers on our ship started pulling the wire rope, across a 10 foot chasm through the small opening in the side of our ship where lines go through. Granted I should probably know what that hole is called, and I might, but the name eludes me at the moment. Anyway they pass the wire rope through that hole and onto a stanchion. The mule then takes up the slack and begins driving forward at the same speed as the ship. There are two teams of line handlers, one in the bow and another at the stern. So this same thing is happening in the rear of the ship as well. The handlers started with the port side of the ship, and then did the starboard side. So we now are tied to four different little locomotives via some wire rope. While all that is going on we are slowly creeping ever closer to the stern of the Atlantic Klipper.
So there we are behind a large ship, tied to four mules, surrounded by concrete walls, and then they started closing the doors. Now I am not one who is generally claustrophobic, but just the sheer magnitude of what was going on was enough to make me shudder slightly as I saw the last rays of sun cut off when the doors finally, and eerily quietly shut. Now when I say quiet, I am not talking the normal humdrum mechanized quiet that accompanies most things on a ship, I mean actually I could not hear these massive steel doors move at all. There was no thud as they came together, there was no reassuring hiss of hydraulic pressure, nothing, just the sunlight being severed. When confronted by the sheer magnitude of some things in life I am often left speechless. Not for lack of vocabulary, or lack of knowledge of the structure of written language, but rather some things written seem almost paltry in comparison to the experience. I have seen grand and terrifying things in my life, but none has left me as nearly dumbfounded as the spectacle that is the Panama Canal. Granted this technology is rather old in the scheme of things, bordering on the antiquated when looking at the size of modern super tankers that share the oceans with us, but the fundamental achievement of moving a vessel through up onto what used to be land, through a jungle, then back down to a completely different ocean is a phenomenal feat of human ingenuity, bravery, and will.
Pulling into the staging area, if you will, it is basically a harbor, but the openness of it was much more so than any other harbor I have personally been in yet. We anchored up amongst the other ships, some of which overshadowed our ships nearly three hundred feet by hundreds and hundreds of feet. We were scheduled to begin our maneuvering into the canal at roughly 3:30pm ship time, as to what the local time was I am not too sure. To this day nearly four months into this internship there are two times I concern myself with, one being ship time, because lets be honest you need to know when to eat and sleep in sync with the ship, and then there is good old eastern standard time, which is the time zone basically a majority of people I know and care about reside in, and well I need to know when not to call them in the middle of the night. So any way the whole thing was set to go at 3:30pm. We were to be in the locks with another ship because by comparison our ship was so small it would have been a waste of space and resources to send it in by itself. So we set in behind the Atlantic Klipper (yes with a K because it was a Russian vessel and that is how it was spelled on the stern of the ship.) I am still not exactly sure the location of the first lock. It kind of appeared out of the aether. I was on deck while we slowly made our way toward it, we crept along at about 2 knots, maybe less. The first thing I remember seeing were the silver mules. Now these mules are actually small trains on rails, but they have kept the moniker of their predecessors, which were, well, flesh and blood mules. Anyway, I was absolutely nerdy giddy in seeing these machinations. I had heard stories about them, and had spent the better part of a week thinking about what they may look like, how they were to keep the boat alined in the middle of the channel, you know the things most people think about in their down time. I could have looked the information up on the internet and found a definitive answer in about 5 minutes, but why ruin the wonder and surprise. Why not savor the unknown. And much to my surprise they were pretty much how I pictured they might look, because well after all how many different ways can you design a small train with a wire coming out of the side.
One thing you must know is that before you pull up to the lock a crew of men, in this case there were no females who boarded our vessel, called line handlers board the ship and well handle the line that leads from the mule to the ship. The mule does not really pull the ship along, its sole purpose is to act a mobile spring line and keep the ship centered so as not to allow it to drift into the side of the lock. Some ships like the GIANT ship in the locks next to us have very little room for error, maybe a foot on either side and it is then metal against concrete, and well generally speaking the metal is going to lose that battle because the concrete is old and hardened. So you can imagine most of the time the line handlers and drivers of the mules have a rather daunting task of keeping very large vessels from moving a foot either side to side or front to back. Our small ship by comparison was probably a walk in the park for these guys. They threw a rope from our ship down to a small dingy that was rowed by one person, and another person caught our line. That line was then passed up to another individual waiting next to the mule. This person put the line through a loop in a large wire rope that was coming out of the side of the mule, tied it off, and the line handlers on our ship started pulling the wire rope, across a 10 foot chasm through the small opening in the side of our ship where lines go through. Granted I should probably know what that hole is called, and I might, but the name eludes me at the moment. Anyway they pass the wire rope through that hole and onto a stanchion. The mule then takes up the slack and begins driving forward at the same speed as the ship. There are two teams of line handlers, one in the bow and another at the stern. So this same thing is happening in the rear of the ship as well. The handlers started with the port side of the ship, and then did the starboard side. So we now are tied to four different little locomotives via some wire rope. While all that is going on we are slowly creeping ever closer to the stern of the Atlantic Klipper.
So there we are behind a large ship, tied to four mules, surrounded by concrete walls, and then they started closing the doors. Now I am not one who is generally claustrophobic, but just the sheer magnitude of what was going on was enough to make me shudder slightly as I saw the last rays of sun cut off when the doors finally, and eerily quiet, shut. Now when I say quiet, I am not talking the normal humdrum mechanized quiet that accompanies most things on a ship, I mean actually I could not hear these massive steel doors move at all. There was no thud as they came together, there was no reassuring hiss of hydraulic pressure, nothing, just the sunlight being severed.