We quickly passed the short gap across the lake and locked through Pedro Miguel Locks, now well underway on our geographically odd journey, northwest from the Pacific to the Caribbean, across the twisted Isthmus of Panama. Ahead of us now lay the section of the canal which was most challenging for its builders, the Galliard Cut. Moving slowly, our ship slipped through this narrow waterway, passing between Engineer’s Hill and Gold Hill (pictures 5 and 6) where the canal’s excavators had had to cut through hundreds of feet of loose, unconsolidated sediments which constantly thwarted their efforts with cave-ins and slides. Jason, our geologist, explained the nature of the rocks here and how they made the work so difficult. Meanwhile, our attention was drawn to the skies where we had the great good fortune of witnessing a fantastic migration of Swainson’s Hawks and other raptors. Minute after minute, tens of thousands of birds circled and soared across the sky above us, their silhouettes peppering the puffy cumulous clouds from one horizon to the other. It was truly a biological marvel, set against a backdrop of marvelous engineering.
After the hawks had passed on toward their nesting grounds in North America, we continued on as well, entering the wide waters of Gatun Lake (pictures 7 and 8). Here we had to pause for a few hours while traffic cleared through the final set of locks ahead of us. The sultry afternoon lured many of us indoors for a nap or some peaceful reading, but a few of us who stayed out were lucky enough to spot an enormous Harpy Eagle perched high in a huge tree which spread its branches over Barro Colorado Island, where the Smithsonian Institution has its famous tropical research station. Finally, as the sun set into the clouds and the day cooled, we locked down through the three chambers at the Gatun Locks and sailed out onto the open waters beyond, completing our long journey up the west coast of South America. We had reached the Caribbean!
