Who will First Transit the Expanded Panama Canal?
Unless you are in the transport or freight forwarding business like we are, you might not be aware of an exciting event coming up in June. 26 June 2016 will be marked as the day when the first vessel was allowed to transit the newly expanded Panama Canal.
How will they decide the first vessel to transit the expanded Panama Canal?
On Friday, 29 April 2016, a draw was held to select the first vessel to transit through the expanded Panama Canal on 26 June 2016. A Notary Public will serve as witness when the draw is held at the Panama Canal Administration Building.
The chosen vessel cannot have a maximum beam of more than 49 meters and a maximum length of 366 meters. Gas carriers cannot be taken into consideration, for obvious security reasons. The maximum point of immersion will be 12.5 meters.
The top fifteen customers of Panama Canal have been invited to participate in the draw to win the honor of the first, inaugural transit through the Canal. The parties who are interested in taking part in the draw had to indicate the Neo Panamax vessel’s name and details including the type and dimensions it planned to deploy. The Vice Presidency for Operations is responsible for verifying that each vessel that wants to take part in the draw complies with the requirements as set out be the Panama Canal. All costs incurred will still be payable by the winner, as per the Panama Canal published tariffs.
The draw was carried out with ballots. Each ballot was labeled with the name of each participant. A child selected the first ballot and handed it to the Public Notary, who announced the winner of the draw. A second name was also drawn, in the event that the winner will not be able to make this inaugural transit. However, the initial winner has to inform the Panama Canal by May 10 that it will not be able to deploy an approved vessel for the inauguration, so that the runner-up can be readied for the big event.
If the winner does not wish to participate, the Panama Canal can send the invitation to another customer. Normally, the chosen customer will then be the next one on the ranking list.
The right to be the inaugural vessel to transit the canal is obviously a great honor, but also has some big marketing value. The event will be streamed live on Youtube and many journalists, bloggers and other interested parties in related industries are expected to write about the event. It therefore makes sense that many customers would want one of their vessels to be the first to transit through the canal.
Only the one vessel will be allowed to travel southbound on the day of the inauguration during daylight hours. Normal hours will commence on 27 June.
Will one of our customers be the first to make this inaugural transit of the expanded Panama Canal?
As you can expect, great excitement is brewing in the whole freight forwarding industry, as this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. To even just have a container on that inaugural vessel, means being part of history. Here in our Macro Clearing offices, we are keeping a keen eye on developments, as we hope that it will be one of our customers that play a part on the big day and is the first vessel to transit the expanded Panama Canal.