Blocked at one chokepoint, a grain fleet sailed the long way east, through four more chokepoints, then had to move again.

This is not the first time the price has done the sorting

The Panama Canal Authority runs a daily priority auction whenever transit demand exceeds available slots. Any vessel that has waited at least ten days may bid, starting at $55,000. In normal conditions, a super booking fee of $135,000 to $140,000 buys a place in the queue. In November 2023, at the worst of the drought, the winning bid reached $3.975 million, a documented record paid by Japan’s Eneos Group for an LPG carrier, the Sunny Bright. Other vessels that stayed on Panama that month paid comparably: chemical tankers around $1.1 million, grain ships in the $2 million to $4 million range.

The auction does not affect every vessel class the same way, and that is the point. LNG and LPG carriers have no workable alternative: the long way around adds weeks, boil-off losses accumulate, and the cargo value justifies almost any slot price, so they bid to the top. Neopanamax container ships face a different constraint: their beam exceeds the old Panamax locks, so the Neopanamax locks are the only passage available regardless of price, and liner schedules make a multi-week reroute expensive in its own right. Both classes stayed on Panama and paid. Handymax and Supramax bulk carriers, the vessels that move grain, coal and fertiliser, could not clear that price against a cargo of 50,000 tonnes of grain, so they left instead, first for Suez and the Red Sea, later for the Cape of Good Hope.

The same two-lever sequence is running again right now. The ACP’s 20 August 2026 advisory cut the maximum authorised draft to 48.0 feet, with a further cut to 47.5 feet, and reduced daily transit slots from a normal 36 to 38 down to 34 from 3 September and 32 from 15 September. Draft restriction first, then transit cuts: the identical order of operations as the opening moves of 2023. Whether it reaches the 2023 auction prices depends on how the rest of the dry season plays out, but the mechanism that produced a $3.975 million bid once is already live again.

What about the other direction? Asia to the Atlantic side

Plenty comes through that way, more than the westbound grain story might suggest. Asia to the US East Coast is the single largest corridor on the canal by tonnage, 48.4% of total 2024 traffic (Port Economics, Management and Policy), well ahead of any other route pairing including the one this page has been describing. It is affected by the same auction and draft mechanism, but different cargo classes responded in different ways, and not always the ways this page assumed above.

Neopanamax container ships mostly stayed on Panama and paid, for the beam and schedule reasons already described. Where lines did shift volume away, the main alternative was not a Suez or Cape reroute but an intermodal one: discharge on the US West Coast and move cargo east by double-stack rail, adding Houston, Charleston and Savannah traffic from a Los Angeles or Long Beach landing instead of a direct East Coast call, the pattern the Baker Institute documented at Rice University, down to a single named vessel, the Ever Max, unloading 700 containers onto Panama’s own railroad rather than transiting. Some volume also moved onto the pre-existing Asia to US East Coast Suez service, roughly a week slower than Panama. Spot cost on the Asia to East Coast lane rose more than a third during the acute period, to an estimated $2,400 per container (Baker Institute). What this page cannot responsibly claim is a clean Los Angeles dwell-time spike caused by that diversion: the port's own leadership was projecting a volume bump as early as August 2023, but the sharpest documented volume swings in the following months, an 18% year-on-year jump in January 2024 among them, were attributed by the port itself to Lunar New Year restocking and a strong US consumer, not to Panama. The diversion to the West Coast was real. A clean, isolated congestion signature from it is not something the public data supports.

Non-container cargo tells a sharper story, and it complicates something this page said earlier. Above, this page treated LNG and LPG carriers as vessels that simply bid to the top and stayed, because the cargo value justifies almost any slot price. That was true of the individual record-setting bids, but not of the fleet as a whole. US LNG cargoes to Asia transiting Panama fell from 38 in the third quarter of 2023 to just 10 a year later; by 2024, roughly 94% of US LNG bound for Asia was routing via the Cape of Good Hope instead, not Suez, adding about 20 days versus Panama and 10 days versus Suez (SynMax). Gas carriers appear to have judged Red Sea war risk unacceptable for their cargo even before their charter economics forced the issue, so they skipped the intermediate Suez step entirely and went straight to the longest safe option. The extra distance carries its own cost beyond charter and bunker: LNG boil-off runs about 0.1% to 0.15% of cargo volume per day on modern tonnage, so 20 extra days at sea means meaningfully more of the cargo either burned as fuel or reliquefied rather than delivered.¹ Very large gas carriers faced a harder version of the same squeeze: neopanamax lock slots effectively reserved for them fell from 31 a day to 8 by early 2024, one VLGC auction slot sold for a documented $2.85 million, and Clarksons Research warned outright that some VLGCs might not be able to transit at all (Riviera Maritime Media). Large crude oil tankers fared worse still. Poten & Partners' assessment was blunt: they will not feature in this trade anymore, priced out of advance scheduling by the same auction mechanism that produced the grain and LNG numbers above.

¹ Boil-off is not a clean loss figure. Modern carriers burn it as propulsion fuel or reliquefy it, and the charterparty, not a fixed rate, determines who bears the cost. A precise dollar figure for the Cape of Good Hope premium would need a specific vessel's boil-off and reliquefaction spec plus its contract terms, neither of which this page has.