Day 91 – 4/15 – Suez Canal

Today we transited the Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal has interesting differences from the Panama Canal. The Suez Canal is about 100 miles long and has no locks. The Panama Canal is about half that long (50 miles), and it has 3 locks on each end that lift the ships about 85 feet for the central transit.

These differences have implications on how the ship traffic is handled. In the Suez Canal, they run a convoy of (in our case) about 27 ships traveling in one direction. This is not possible in the Panama Canal because only two ships can be lifted at one time in the two parallel locks. The convoys are timed such that they reach the center lake at the same time, where it is wide enough for them to pass by each other. For each end section of the Canal, it is narrow enough that ships can only go one direction or the other at a given time.

In Panama, there are more lake sections, so the two-way traffic works except for about one 9-mile stretch. So in Panama, this allows ships to always be ready in each direction because you want a ship ready in each direction so that there is always a ship within a lock when the water is raised and when it is lowered.

There is not much to see during the transit. The east side, Sinai and Asia, is brown desert the whole way. There was one green spot midway where they had a war memorial and a stadium, but that was it.

On the west side, the African side, there are some housing and some greenery.