World Cruise 2012: Suez Canal Transit

The ship travels through the night to the entrance of the Suez Canal. As planned, we anchor at 2:30 a.m. in the Suez Gulf to submit paperwork, board a pilot and obtain a position in the northbound convoy of ships. The time estimate the previous evening is that the ship will start moving into the canal at around 6 a.m., somewhere in the middle of the northbound convoy. We awake at 5:15 a.m., surprisingly to the unmistakable feel of a moving ship – WOW! – Queen Elizabeth had the honor of being assigned lead position in the convoy and had moved into the Suez Canal at 5:00 a.m.

How very different is this canal in comparison to the Panama Canal! Desert, not jungle, on both sides and armed guards visible all along the way. Most of you, regardless of adolescent love affairs and flying spitballs, aced 8^th grade geography, and there is lots of information on the internet you can read; ergo not-so-many boring factoids in this blog. The long Egyptian history in the area between the Sinai Peninsula and mainland Egypt is itself interesting. Weave into that the building this canal, the second or third version of a canal in this area to connect the Red and Mediterranean seas at the nexus of three continents, and it becomes a fascinating tale from the past!

This version of the Suez Canal was completed in 1869 and has been nearly continuously under enlargement and improvement. It carries 25,000 ships a year and was once known as “the highway to India.” However, many of today’s massive cargo ships, mostly due to bridges that they cannot go under, are unable to transit the Suez Canal to India so they must go around Africa. This is the same problem that the Panama Canal still is trying to address, even with its new wider and deeper lane almost complete. Along with its inability to handle the largest ships, the Suez Canal’s ship-count is also down because today – with much larger ships, more efficient container-shipping techniques and improved shipping logistics – far fewer ships are required to move goods around our planet.

We will remember this transit both as our first and also because it occurred on the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Surely everyone reading this has also heard of this anniversary. Today our ship observed a minute of silence at noon in memory of all of those who lost their lives at sea on the Titanic. Another fact of onboard interest is that the Carpathia, the liner that steamed at speeds well beyond its rating (by waking and deploying all of its off-duty coal stokers) for over 100 miles to save all the 750 or so passengers who survived the Titanic disaster, was a Cunard ship and the Carpathia’s illustrious Master (aka captain) would subsequently become Master of the entire Cunard fleet.

Now that the ship is through the Suez Canal (2:30 p.m.), we enter the Mediterranean Sea. Tomorrow’s port is Alexandria and we will take a tour of the pyramids and a Nile cruise. Check another one off the ‘Bucket List!’