There was no visible sunrise on Thursday, February 13.

The day started with a power outage. It lasted less than an hour, and there was another outage later in the day that only lasted for a few minutes. 

On the day that we’d arrived, Eric immediately regretted not backing the boat into the slip. He has been wanting to flip the boat around ever since, but given how shallow the spot was, it has simply been too windy to do so safely. Today the wind finally died. Flipping the boat around went smoothly. We are all happier with the boat backed in – the ventilation is better and its easier to get on and off. 

After lunch, Eric and Keith went for a walk, then Eric ran a kids D & D session. In the early evening, we had dinner with Basik again. After dinner, Eric and Keith played Civilization with the Ocean Posse group online again. 

On Friday morning, the full moon was glowing brightly before the sun rose. 

And we did have a sunrise, despite the ominous clouds.

We decided to take a taxi to Agua Clara Locks Visitor center, where you can watch the large ships going through the new locks. It’s located on the west side of the canal, just a few miles south of the Gatun Bridge. As with the Castillo de San Lorenzo, we paid a taxi driver to wait for us so that we’d have a ride back out. He charged $60 for the drive to/from the marina + wait time. 

The visitor center was on the edge of Lake Gatun, at the entrance of the top lock.

The center was at a higher altitude so that we were looking down on the lake/locks. It was neat to see from the distance where we had moored on both of our canal transits. Here is a photo of the entrance to the lock from the lake.

We lucked out because when we arrived, there was a ship that had just entered the first lock. Many people pay the admission fee, but don’t get to see a ship go through.

The Gatun Locks were visible in the distance.

The new locks only use tugboats to hold the ships in place, not “mules” like the old locks. The lock doors were two sliding gates moving simultaneously instead of the swinging doors in the old locks. It took a solid 4+ minutes with that annoying alarm for the gates to close. 

The new locks were designed for the water to be re-used from lock to lock, so this water drained into a reservoir for the next lock. This was the lowest we saw the lock.

A short movie played every half-hour and was getting ready to start. We weren’t sure how much lower the lock would go, but we decided we’d seen it go low enough to justify going to see the movie. Sadly, the movie was in Spanish with no subtitles, but we got the gist that it talked about what an engineering marvel the canal was and how the canal benefitted society overall. There were a lot of beautiful aerial shots that helped with comprehension of how the whole canal system worked. 

When the movie was over, we hopped on a shuttle bus that took us to the middle lock. The ship had moved forward into this lock, and was waiting to go down.

We took a few photos and hopped the bus back to the main visitor’s center. We made it back just in time to see the lock doors sliding shut, and much to our relief, this time there was no alarm.

We wandered around the center and looked at the exhibits, which weren’t particularly interesting. When we returned to the viewpoint, the ship was already down and the first lock had been refilled with water.

We watched the ship slowly drive forward into the bottom lock. After the gate closed, we decided that we’d seen enough — we didn’t need to see it get to the ocean.

As we were leaving, we realized that the movie played in English on the top of the hour and Spanish on the bottom of the hour. We were sad to see that the English movie had just ended.

One of the attractions of the Agua Clara Visitor’s Center was a nature trail, but we hadn’t found it. As we were getting into the taxi, we noticed the entrance was in the parking lot. We decided to skip the trail.

We think it was an interesting experience to see the transit, but it probably was not worth the $100+ we’d paid for the taxi ride and admission fees. But at least a ship was there — we would have been upset about spending so much money had a ship not been in the locks while we were there.

In the evening, we went to the pool. The pool was packed most evenings, so it was generally a very social experience for adults and kids alike.