The evening after leaving Aqaba we had "Rock the Boat", a fun pool-side party where we danced under the stars and had Baileys and cream puffs drenched in chocolate sauce. We had a blast but it had been a very long, tiring day and I've been under the weather fighting a nasty cold/cough for the past week or so.
We spent a day at sea on our way to the Suez Canal and upon arrival in the late afternoon we were told that we would likely start the transit at 3:30 am with a total transit time of about 9 hours. That evening the captain announced that transit had been delayed. A couple of updates later we learned that we would not be transiting until the next day and probably not until late at night, which meant we would miss the entire transit int he darkness of night. What a bummer! Our luck held though, and we finally heard that the Canal authorities had "tentatively" scheduled our convoy for 4:30 am and that unfortunately we would have to miss one of the upcoming ports. The whole delay (which is quite unusual) was due to some bad weather in the Mediterranean which had held back the south-bound convoys. The Suez Canal is one-way only and ships travel in convoys; once a convoy has completed the transit, the next one sets out in the opposite direction. Our convoy today consists of 36 ships due to the backlog created yesterday.
We have now just begun the second half of the transit having passed straight through the Great Bitter Lake. At this point there is very active construction going on for the canal expansion. We are due to exit into the Mediterranean at about 2 pm.
The Suez canal was designed by Lesseps, the same guy who designed the Panama Canal. Construction lasted 10 years and was completed in 1869, reducing the route between Western Europe and India by almost 8,000 kms. It stretches for 195 kms connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and allows passage of approximately 40 ships each day, from tankers to cruiseships to container ships and private yachts. Revenues from the canal are approximately $5.5 billion a year and since the decline in the tourism industry of the past few years is now the biggest driver of the Egyptian economy. The expansion, which is actually a twinning of the existing canal, will double its capacity.
As we exited the canal along the Egyptian coast on the Mediterranean Sea we saw a seemingly never-ending number of oil rigs, much like we'd seen on the Red Sea before entering the canal.
Near Port Suez and the exit to the Med
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