Cruise Ship Diaries Part 10

I will freely admit I know next to nothing about the Panama Canal before I actually stepped foot on it, and to be honest I still do not know as much as I would have liked to have known at the time.

After finishing Alaska and passing through Mexico, a transit through the Panama Canal was the highlight of many passengers trips and like the uneducated goof I was at the time I really couldn't see the appeal.

The ship spends all day going through a series of locks (gates) where water levels rise and lower to let ships move more quickly between the Atlantic & Pacific oceans, thats the simple version.

From a little googling the idea of the Panama Canal can be traced back to 1513 and Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa who was the first European to discover that Panama was essentially a slim land bridge beween the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. Construction started in 1881 and was taken over by the USA in 1904 and finished in 1914 with the US spending close to $9 billion by todays figures on completing it.

Due to a whole bunch of polictical issues I have no interest in exploring America gave ownership of the Canal back to Panama in 2007, and ironically I learned more reseaching the above paragraph than I learned while I was actually there.

The reason for not having a lot of time to learn about the places I was travelling too was the ridiculously long hours and active social side of the ship experience and as I'd learn Panama would become one of the longest days of each cruise. (Above is the full transit of the locks during our reposition cruise on the Coral, 2007)

If I remember clearly the first time we transited through the Canal I had to take care of the time lapse shot onboard while Heather my senior got off the ship and had the fun of shooting acutally on the side of the canal. As senior it was her responsability for the shoot /edit as the Canal hopefully would be the big seller for the DVD. I really don't remember much more than being outside for hours and hours filming jumping between different time lapse cameras and making sure the guests didn't knock into them or worse crew!

A few cruises later I got my first full Panama experience which was an amazing day despite having to work!

As the deck 9 photog corridor could be a loud place, the one universal rule was that our quiet night was the night before the Panama Canal as one videographer, manager or assistant manager and one photog would have to get up around 4.30 / 5a.m in the morning!

My first time shooting the canal I was with my friend Amanda who was a fellow Brit and first contracter as well who despite only being a level 1 was going to shoot the Canal. Normally you'd have a more experienced photog there but our manager Rafael (who joined us that day for the shoot) decided to give her the chance as it was her last cruise before heading home.

After just about waking up (sobering up) we meet Raf at the deck 4 midship gunport where we then had to climb down a rope ladder and jump onto the pilot boat that would take us ashore while the ship went through the locks. This was seriously some action movie shit, you had to pass all your equipment and make sure your life jacket was secure. Its still crazy to think that I had to jump from a moving cruise ship onto another smaller boat after about 3 hours sleep while it was still night outside, in your twenties you do not question any of it and you jump when they tell you!

Once on land a jeep was waiting to take us to the locks where we would film the ship going through, from an artistic point it would have been great to focus on the mechanical and technical aspects of the ships transit however it was 2007 and the main reason for us being ashore was to take pictures of the guests waving at us from their balconies onboard.

I think we all hated the smile and wave way of doing things back then but that was the edich from head office and video even more than photo was about trying to get as many faces as possible in each video.

Even the photographers onboard had to spend the day shooting 'decks', which is whenever the ship is cruising through somewhere of note with a good (or usually not even!) background they will have to pester the guests to pose for a picture that they can buy the next day for $20 in the photo gallery.

I think that was a large part of what was inherently wrong with the way video was being treated at the time within Princess was that we were just the DVD version of a still photo, for many of us it seemed like such a waste to be in all these amazing locations worldwide with the focus on the guests and not the places we were cruising through.

We could have made such a great documentary that would be interesting to the guests onboard that I'm sure would have sold many more DVD's. Unfortunately I heard from a friend who had worked the Panama run many years after me that the focus was still on the guests and that the video team had to work with the entertainment department to help the passengers make signs that they would display from the balcony during the shoot.

What made shooting the canal a long day was that once you had filmed the ship going through one set of locks you would have 3-4 hours off while you waited for the ship to transit to the next set of locks where we would meet the ship again, so what did we do in the meantime?

Thats right the photo department actually paid for us to hangout for the day between the shooting the locks at the 5 Star Melia Hotel located a short drive from the hotel. Free food and a drinks budget! Needeless to say once word got out everyone wanted to shoot Panama, lucky as a videographer it meant I would be there once every two cruises as myself and Heather would rotate who filmed the locks.

And just for fun the hotel complex had its own zipline

Which I may not have mastered on my first attempt!

I also didn't help that as I managed to slow down and Amanda who was fiming me yelled 'look down theirs crocdiles!' I cannot say I actually saw them but I sure as hell wasn't looking down while I was dangling from a rope upside down. I was humiliatingly saved by one of the guides who had to shimmy down the line, strap himself to me and then pull both mine and his bodyweights down to the platform!

The rest of the day would be spent swimming and hanging out by the pool waiting for the ship to get to the port on the overside of the locks, eventually we would get there around 5pm / 6pm and head straight back onboard. Then I'd dump the footage, shower, power nap for an hour and the night would be finishing the canal edit if it was my turn to edit which would usually taken until around 10pm to finish, another hour to export and then finally walkaround the ship in a zombiefied state dropping off the new dubs (daily dubs were DVD's that had the most recent shoots on a loop, that played 24/7 on the ships TV and where ever else ship management would let us!

On the next cruise diaries - Panama:The Revenge, bribing our driver to take us into Panama City and surviving my first helicopter shoot over the canal