Barro del Colorado Island & Panamá Canal
Today was our first full day on board the Sea Voyager and the beginning of a seven day trip from Panama to Costa Rica. Our journey actually began yesterday after dinner when we started the transit of the first three sets of locks on the Caribbean side, known as the Gatun Locks. At this stage, the ship was raised 85 feet above sea level. At 10:20 P.M. we dropped anchor in Gatun Lake where we spent the night.
Early this morning a pilot boarded from the Panama Canal, our second so far, to assist the ship sailing over to our morning destination: Barro Colorado Island (BCI).
BCI is a man made island created when the Chagres river was dammed to create the Gatun Lake and the fresh waterway for the Panama Canal; so this island was one of the few mountain tops that became an island in 1914.
And by 1923 this 13,256 acres of land was declared a biological reserve and research began in this tropical place. By 1946 the Smithsonian Institute became the administrator of the place. As you can guess this is probably one of the most well studied tropical rain forest that we know in the entire world; most of the books published about tropical ecology have used data that have been gathered in this place through numerous research projects.
Today we had a chance to learn some of the research going on today on BCI. Our first encounters with tropical flora and fauna granted sightings of howler monkeys, white throated capuchin monkeys, snail kites, bat falcons, and toucans. Additionally, we witnessed the different gear used by scientists to explore this area, such as telemetry towers and motion-activated cameras that will capture images of night dwellers of the forest.
After our morning walks and Zodiac rides and back on board the ship, the third pilot of the canal boarded the ship to complete the last part of the transit. Our passage through Culebra Cut the narrowest part of the canal and the last three set of locks in the pacific side, where we were lowered 85 feet to the level of the Pacific Ocean ending a successful day in the isthmus of Panama.
