Today we transited the entire suez canal. Approx 120 miles long, starting at about 6am and exiting about 3:30 pm. We were the lead sled dog, which as you know what they say....if you're not the lead sled dog, the view is all the same. We were anchored all night in the Red Sea awaiting the first light of dawn to begin. Parts of the Suez Canal are one lane, some are two lanes. For much of its length, the canal is not wide enough to allow traffic to travel in both directions at once; convoys of ships must take turns transiting these segments of the waterway. We were lucky that we seemed to have the right of way. You may also remember the 2021 incident where the canal was blocked for 6 days. The Panama-flagged Ever Given/Evergreen a colossal container ship, crashed into a bank on a single-lane stretch of the canal in March 2021, blocking the waterway for six days.
In the pics below, we were tracking our position. The left pic is from last night. We're the green dot while anchored. Yellow and orange are ships exiting the suez canal. The middle pic shows the halfway point around Ismalia, where the canal opens up quite wide and where ships may wait while convoys pass. The right shows us (the blue dot) exiting this afternoon.
Monuments we saw along the way were interesting. The significance wasn't always clear but the bottom middle memorialized the 2021 incident mentioned above.
Bridges along the way were surprisingly interesting. There's only one fixed bridge structure and is the only place you can drive from the continent of Asia to Africa. There are several ferries along the way as well. But 2 interesting alternatives were 2 types of pivoting bridges. On the below right, that's for a train. One pivoting bridge on each side pivots a quarter turn to create a straight track across the canal. It's no longer in use but it was an interesting concept. The middle pic shows trucks lined up to cross a floating bridge that also pivots to connect both sides. There were several of these along the route.
Other boats along the way were also interesting. There were quite a few fishermen in small row boats, several of whom didn't automatically yield to us so the captain blew our horn at them loud and long.
Other sites along the way
Going north, the left side was far more interesting and populated than the right side, with the exception of a gargantuan vacant housing development on the right that the Egyptian govt is building to reduce overcrowding in the cities. These desert communities are supposedly the new next-best-thing, but it looked eerie seeing miles of midrise apartment buildings completely vacant, easily over 100,000 units.
We'll be in Israel tomorrow. Till then....
Comments