Gulf of Panama, Panama Canal, Panama
Today we awoke sailing our way into the Gulf of Panama on our way to the Panama Canal.
This gulf is one of the few places in Central America where the mountain range is low enough, to allow the trade winds of the Atlantic side to blow all the way across the isthmus and arrive at the gulf with sufficient strength, to blow away the warm sterile water of the surface and let it be replace by cold nutrient rich water from the bottom. Triggering an explosion of platoon life, it brings small fish to feed on the platoon, which in turn attracts larger fish that feed on the small ones, and so on and so on, up the food chain, this is what is known as upwelling.
Upwelling like this, supports an incredible and large community of marine life as well as seabirds. With this in mind, the captain anchored the ship close to three islands that are used by seabirds as nesting colonies in these rich waters. So right after breakfast we spent the first part of the morning exploring these seabird colonies on Zodiacs, to see what was out there. What a show we had! We saw brown pelicans, brown boobies, some of them with chicks, magnificent frigatebirds in full courtship display and even blue-footed boobies. They were literally thousands of birds around us.
After our morning excursions we started our sail to the Panama Canal to begin our crossing, in what is one of the marvels of engineering in our modern era. Built almost a hundred year ago, with very little change over the years, it still works as it was intended to, and is still one of the most important water ways of our time.
