Courtesy of Marine Traffic
Looking at AIS data of the anchorages at both the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the Panama Canal, you will see a huge backlog of ships, mostly tankers and cargo ships it seems.
We [gCaptain] reached out to Marine Traffic Control at the Panama Canal, who told us there were a total of 129 waiting vessels between the two anchorages as of Thursday afternoon, with waiting times right now of five days for unbooked vessels – that is vessels that did not pay the premium to reserve a space.
On Thursday, non-booked northbound vessels scheduled to pass through the canal have been waiting at anchor since Oct. 16 and 17. For non-booked southbound vessels, the wait time is even worse. Those vessels arrived on Oct. 14 and 15, seven and eight days ago.