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Comment by kylelibra | Hacker News Reader

If you are wondering why:

"A statement provided to us Friday from the Panama Canal Authority said that a high level of arrivals during the last in September coincided with schedule dry-chamber maintenance."

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Scheduled with who? Obviously not their clients, the shipping companies.

Kind of like ebay not considering their 2-hour Sunday "planned maintenance events" to be outages ... for 2 decades.

What are the shipping companies going to do, use the Nicaragua Canal?

I assume someone is running the numbers for fuel cost and time to just sail around South America, it has to break even or be a better deal at some point.

Just add 10,700 miles[1][2][3] (26 days) and sail around one of the most dangerous navigation hazards in the world.

No big deal.

[1]: Assumes turning around on the Pacific side

[2]: Southbound https://www.searates.com/reference/portdistance/?B=23078&E=2...

[3]: Northbound https://www.searates.com/reference/portdistance/?B=20155&E=2...

No kidding. A map of the shipping routes show that effectively no one takes that route these days, nor is there a 5 day detour for any well-trafficked route. (Eg, see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shipping_routes_red_... .)

They say that in Chilean waters past 40º S there is no law. And past 50º there is no God.

You have to get to about 57º to pass around the Horn in open water.

I'd be mighty interested in learning more on this. Care to recommend some reading materials?

Cape Horn to Starboard is the story of a guy doing it on a small sailboat: http://www.amazon.com/Cape-Horn-Starboard-John-Kretschmer/dp... Here's a shorter, more recent report of a rounding: http://www.cruisingworld.com/destinations/cape-horn-starboar... And a series of articles/videos about how it's done on a sailboat: http://www.yachtingworld.com/video/skip-novaks-storm-sailing... Not for the faint of heart. Tradewinds crossings like Mediterranean to Caribbean are much easier since the weather is generally tamer, more predictable and behind you.

ETA: The southern 40s are known as the roaring 40s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties There's not much land to stop the winds from ripping around the planet.

So what happens if there's a 1 year backlog at the Panama canal? Still not worth it?

Explain how you expect that would happen. What specific, reasonably plausible events would have to occur? Remember to take into account the fact that the canal will be adding capacity shortly, with the addition of the new bigger locks.

What I'm trying to get at is that, unless the canal was shut down completely for months at a time, there is no economical situation where it would make sense to round the cape instead of just waiting it out.

Dock ships on both sides of land. Truck goods from one ship to the other. Or maybe that would also be too expensive?

There's a railroad. It can carry about 1,500 containers a day[1]. There are approximately 175,000 containers waiting to transit the canal, based on the 33,500 figure in the linked Wiki page and the 5 day wait.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_Railway#2001_reco...

Technically Panama's is the first transcontinental railroad, beating the Union Pacific by fourteen years. Panama's was running in 1855 while the line over the Sierra Nevada opened in 1869.

These ships carry more cargo than you can intuitively comprehend. Transfer to truck would be impossible, to rail would take too long.

Transfer to truck/rail would also require a lot of seaport facilities which simply haven't been built in the area (it's designed as a canal, after all). You'd have to send the ships up to some container port on the Gulf of Mexico and ship them out via train to Los Angeles or someplace with capacity.

You probably know, but for those who don’t: that still is vapourware, but seems borderline feasible both technically and economically, so we may see it built (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal).

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