Today we are at sea. We awoke this morning with a distant view of Cuba from our cabin window on the port side of the ship.
We are leaving the Atlantic Ocean and by late afternoon will be heading south passing the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and entering the Caribbean Sea and travel overnight to Grand Cayman. We used the time to explore the ship.
The Coral Princess has been designed and built to enable a full transit of the Panama Canal. It is built to PANAMAX rules as the largest possible ship to use the locks of the canal. The ship has a maximum weight of 90,000 tons, is no longer than 304.8 metres and no wider than 33.53 metres and with a draught of no more than 12 metres. It is capable of carrying some 2000 passengers. As we will see later new sets of locks were opened in 2016 to enable post-PANAMAX ships to transit. These are even bigger at up to 400 metres in length.
The centre of our ship is the Atrium and all the decks open to the public lead from this. Another ten in total.
Today is for relaxing and is quite soporific as one hardly knows one is moving. We ate lunch at the very front of the ship on Deck 14 in the Horizon Restaurant.
