Canal trouble

Blog entry for May 2024

Canal trouble

We ship puzzles all over the world, and we aim to meet all customer needs: this includes both speed and economy. The Covid era pretty much wrecked this: costs have risen hugely, and there were huge extra delays. Now things are almost! back to normal, so speed delivery is not a problem. But as if to keep everything interesting we have a couple of new problems. They do not specifically mention canals (so the rest is my supposition), but the Post Office is warning of possible extra delays of up to three months: probably a worst-case guess, but we feel obliged to pass it on.

Panama Canal

The Panama canal is crucial if you want to make a quick transit between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Shouldn't really affect us much: if you look at the globe, we reach Europe via the Suez canal, and most of North and South America from the west coast. Except that some years ago the US Post Office decided it would be more "efficient" if everything went to a single point on the east coast - so that anything bound for Hawaii sails past early in the journey, then travels two oceans, the Caribbean, and the canal, only to return overland and sail again from California. Such is modern business, and of course the US is a large sector of our market.

The problem is environmental: getting a single ship through the locks of the Panama uses a huge amount of water, and rainfall in Panama has simply dropped. This is all seasonably variable, and currently operation is almost normal, but this could change at any time. The extra sailing time to go around the tip of South America, or perhaps to go via the Indian and Atlantic oceans is going to be several weeks.

A bit of data: recent surface orders to the US:

• Sent November 28 -- arrived February 9
• Sent December 8 -- arrived February 21

...and you can get updates from this website: Current status of Panama canal

Suez Canal

The Suez canal is the key to all European destinations, and this one is political, with the current strife in the Middle East. It seems that shipping companies are avoiding the canal for the time being - you can check the situation here: Current status of Hapag Lloyd. Fortunately the extra trip around the Cape of Good Hope only adds around 7-10 days to the voyage, and currently surface to Europe is taking around 9 weeks.

The Stroudwater canal

This one doesn't directly affect us! The photo at the top of this post shows the sorry state of Whitminster lock... In the eighteenth century the inland canal system of England and Wales made a huge contribution to the industrial revolution: at last crockery made in Stoke-on-Trent could be safely carried to the burgeoning cities of the north, Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds. Further south, the Stroudwater canal connected the river Severn to the town of Stroud (where I grew up), and then the Thames and Severn canal joined this to the Thames. Then coal from the forest of Dean could be carried economically to London.

These canals fell out of use in the early twentieth century, but from the 1960s and 70s, canals saw a resurgence for leisure use, and many have been restored. The two canals connecting the Thames and the Severn, the two great rivers of southern England have been dubbed the "Cotswold canals", and there is an ongoing project ultimately to restore full navigation, through the Sapperton tunnel which was once the longest tunnel in England. You can read more about it here: Cotswold Canals.