The world’s newest cruise ship, the ballyhooed Queen Victoria on her first voyage around the globe, squeezed through the Panama Canal yesterday.

These Panama transits between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are no simple feat for the new behemoths of the cruise world.

With larger cabins, private balconies and ever bigger on-board accouterments to entice new vacationers to sea, some ships are too big to fit into the canal’s locks.

Others, such as the 2,000-passenger Queen Victoria, are built to the maximum allowance, stretching their length and width to the limits of the walls of the Panama Canal locks that raise vessels more than 75 feet from the ocean to a fresh water lake, then lower them from the lake to the opposite ocean.

We did not have a foot to spare.

Maximum length for a ship to float through the Panama Canal is 965 feet. Queen Victoria is 964 ½ feet. Maximum width is 106 feet. The Queen’s beam is 106 feet, and workmen aboard spent the previous day tucking lifeboats closer to the ship and stowing away window washers and other equipment that normally hang out past the railings.

The Queen, girdled with cinches pulled tight, slid easily into and out of the canal locks. But not without a few scrapes to the sides of the hull.

"They’ll be someone with a paintbrush out in port tomorrow," said First Officer Martin Allen.

In the picture, above, taken from a balcony cabin on Queen Victoria, ships are moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific in two parallel systems of locks. The cruise ship on the right is ready to move out of a lock, to be followed by the container ship, bottom right. But first the container ship will be raised in its lock to reach the level of the water floating the cruise ship. Engines in the middle, known as mules, run on tracks and pull ships into and out of the locks.

Queen Victoria is on her inaugural world cruise, a 106-night journey that began in Southampton, England,  Jan. 6. Victoria stopped in New York for an evening with the other two ships of Cunard, Queen Mary 2 and Queen Elizabeth 2, and then headed south to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Aruba and Panama before heading north toward Los Angeles and a crossing of the Pacific.

Of the 2,000 passengers on this ship, filled to capacity, 760 are doing the full world cruise. Others get on and off for segments of the voyage as the Queen circles the globe. The world cruisers include 400 from the United Kingdom who boarded in Southampton, 300 U.S. residents who boarded in New York, 30 Germans and 30 others from various countries.  The cost for each person taking the full cruise ranged from $20,000 to $200,000, depending on the size of the cabin.

The cruise fee included nearly $140 per person just to get through the Panama Canal. Cunard paid $275,000 for the privilege of taking this shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Molyneaux is editor of TravelMavens.net. CLICK for articles on cruising, Florida, Europe and adventure.