Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Dram: Great Bitter Lake Wait

Because the Suez Canal is only one ship wide, there can only be one "convoy" of ships -- moving either north or south -- in it at a time. Fortunately, there is a large body of water about half-way called Great Bitter Lake where convoys can safely pass each other. Although this helps improve the efficiency of the process, there's still a lot of waiting involved in transiting the Suez Canal. In our case, we had to wait almost a whole day in Port Said for a northbound convoy to clear the northern half of the Canal, then wait almost a whole day again in Great Bitter Lake for another northbound convoy to clear the southern half of the Canal. Here's a Dram of the Great Bitter Lake wait.

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