April 9th - Suez Canal

We were able to just put our feet up and enjoy the passage through the Suez Canal from the comfort of our own balcony. Ahhhh....this is the life!

We entered the southern part of the canal at the town of Suez at about 5:30 AM. We were the second ship in the only northbound convoy of the day…there are two southbound convoys each day. The canal is approximately 100 miles long and we exited the northern part at Port Said at 3:00 PM. The canal has no locks, is 984 feet wide at its narrowest part, and permits ships drawing up to 53 feet to transit. In 2005, a total of 18,193 vessels transited the canal. Receipts from the canal from July 2005 to May 2006 totaled $3.246 billion!

Tonight in the Mediterranean Sea we saw one of the strangest sights we’ve ever seen!! Hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds swarming around the ship!! Occasionally a flock of them would catch the light as they moved in formation through the air, looking like glittering shooting stars or thousands of fireflies. And there were different kinds of birds…. we saw one long-necked heron-type bird attempt to land on the side of the ship. Also a very large hawk or some type of raptor that sat for a long while on one of the lifeboats. It was all very eerie!! We felt like extras in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”!! Apparently they had hoses out up on the top deck to get the birds off the windows of the Winter Garden! We know that birds and animals often have an inkling of natural disasters, like earthquakes and tsunamis, so we wondered if maybe we needed to get some things ready in case we needed to abandon ship. (I know, I know….. we vowed to do this way back when we were in Pago Pago, but…. you know how it is….. “the best laid plans….”)