Month: May 2016

(Tuesday, May 24th, 2016)

We are in Antwerp, Belgium for the next couple of days. This is my penultimate stop, and the last port that I will exit on board a freighter ship. It has been a long voyage. I’ll probably say that again in the next couple of posts!

The voyage into Antwerp was rainy and windy and cold, so we were out on deck taking pictures for short periods, then scurrying back in to our cozy cabins and looking out portholes for the next photo op. Along the way were some small towns, some beaches, and a resort town, then a gap with only green small hills, and then the bustle of Antwerp Port. We went through a lock to get to Antwerp. I have some photos through a porthole, but it was late at night and I didn’t go up on deck to seek better pictures. We berthed after midnight. Our schedule has us leaving at night as well, so I don’t expect great pictures on the way out.

Antwerp is also a huge port. I didn’t see that as much on the way in, because it was dark and was also the middle of the night so I didn’t get out of bed for it. But when we went to immigration in the taxi, on our way into town, we saw signs for so many ports. We were in docks 468 and 470 (our ship is long, tee hee). There were signs to docks numbering to 2000. Oh my. We traveled over several small drawbridges, the roadways and channels intertwining in the port.

Yesterday, our first full day in port, I went into old town Antwerp and walked around, mostly for the entire day. It was drizzly and a bit chilly but not so much as to prevent walking. For us Americans, the “old town” of these ancient European cities include still-in-use buildings that predate our entire history, so “old” really means old.

Since I knew that I was going back to the ship via taxi, I walked wherever I wanted, never consulting a map, since I knew that after I got lost (it isn’t an “if”, it’s a “when”, I know me) I could catch a cab back to the ship. So I wandered, taking pictures of whatever seemed interesting. I did get lost, and walked into a nearby restaurant for a nice dinner and some very nice, compared to the box wine on board, California wine. Tee hee!

The only trouble with this “technique” is that I cannot report where I was or what, exactly, I saw. Some days this concerns me, but yesterday it didn’t. I just walked and snapped. Quite satisfying.

There was one square, and a tall cathedral, that was more of a focal point than some others. Several streets meandered away from this square, maybe five or six at least. All of these streets were narrow, many of them restricted to pedestrian and bicycle traffic only, and all of them paved with cobblestones. The cobblestone streets and rail tracks help me to understand the big wheels and fat tires of the typical sit-up Belgian bicycles. There were shops all around, and some restaurants that claimed to be hundreds of years old. Pretty cool.

I imagine that it is true for most European cities, but maybe more so here, that “ordinary folk” are extremely (at least to Americans) multi-lingual. I was warming up with a latte in a coffee shop, and my server, and her helper, spoke clear American English to me almost without accent, French to the next guy in line, Flemish (I assume) to a boyfriend of one of them who came by to chat, and German to a group of ladies deciding about pastries. In each case the talk was fast, not halting, and so I assume that they were as smooth with the others as they were with me. They switched languages as if there were no switch occuring, as if it were all the same language. That’s so cool. I understood maybe two or three German words and maybe, maybe, four French words. And I am giving myself credit for “Hello”.

It is also true, at least it seems that way in my limited exposure, that more young people in Europe smoke than in the US. That’s not so cool.

Again, I took some photos of small cars I want to see imported to the US. Or, better yet, to be designed and manufactured by US automakers. Ford still makes good profit building F-150s at the Rouge plant near Detroit. I took a plant tour there last year after a volleyball tournament. So why not great little cars, not just cheap little cars? Alfa-Romeo gets good money for their great little cars. I believe there’s a market. A teensy soapbox moment there.

We are in Antwerp until tomorrow evening, so I might go out and about again, and might add to this post or to photos. Or maybe I will leave it as is. Tonight I expect to be at the Seamen’s center, with WiFi, so I’ll post this post much closer to its original date.

I updated my progress map. Look in “cooked” for “Progress Map”. There’s only one dashed line left. I hope we pass Gibraltar in daytime!

(Sunday, May 22nd, 2016)

We are back in the North Sea, headed from Hamburg to Antwerp. The sea is smooth, and the swells are small. It is raining outside, a steady drizzle, a bit chilly, but not especially windy. Not a bad day for traveling. We expect to be in Antwerp late tonight. We pick up a pilot late in the afternoon, for a long trip up a river. There will be a lock to go through, and the Captain hopes that it isn’t crowded at the lock.

I didn’t go in to visit Hamburg, so I have nothing to write about the city itself. The logistics were a bit difficult, as our berth was a ways from town center, and frankly my energy level was low. This post will be about the port visit.

We sailed to Hamburg via a long approach up the Elbe River from the North Sea. The river starts out extremely wide and then narrows to, well, fairly wide still, as it reaches the city. There were small towns all along the way, with deeply green fields, houses with dark pitched roofs over red brick, and spikey church steeples. Small herds of cows and sheep grazed nearby. Pastoral.

Interspersed with these scenes were the occasional pieces of industry: A small refinery, some sort of grain storage and shipping, and ferries to Hamburg and London from small docks. As we got closer to Hamburg the balance of small town / industry tilted towards industry. Finally, when we could see the city in the distance, the river was almost consumed with industry on both sides, with the exception of some expensive-looking homes with huge sloping lawns on the north side of the river. We passed by a regional airport whose long runway ended at the river’s edge. Eerie, looking down the business end of a runway. We were “in the way”. No planes while we passed. Whew.

Many sailboats were out and about, of all sizes and shapes. The day we arrived was sunny and windy, so pretty nice for them. I took a photo or two of sailboats sailing past some cows and sheep. Ha.

The Hamburg port is huge. It compares to Shanghai in size. It certainly feels that way. There are many pathways as you approach the city, and each seem to have many cranes visible in the distance. You gotta leave crumbs in the water so you can find your way back out.

Hamburg is where Rickmers, our ship’s owner and operator (two different companies), has their home office. So, once we berthed, we were visited by many people. There was even a group of Rickmers employees, maybe 20 of them, who came on a bus and toured the ship to “get a feel”. After all, their work involves ships and shipping, and yet so many of them have no clue what is it like on a ship discharging, loading, and transporting cargo. I had a good time talking with some of them as the “Chief Passenger”. A couple of them had to be told that that was a joke, that passengers had no rank. Kind of cute. I wish that Rickmers could allow them a few days on board, during travel. That’s much different than walking around a berthed ship. But any exposure to the real world that gets affected by their desk jobs is a good thing, so I applaud Rickmers.

A couple of the Rickmers folk, learning that I was American, asked about Donald Trump, looking for insight I guess. Oh my. Oh well. I am not a fan of that association. This isn’t a political blog so I’ll stop right there.

We had one really cool loading. A large yacht, a new Hanse 675. Like the catamarans we had on board across the Pacific, it is noticeable how much effort is spent on attempting to prevent even a scratch while loading and discharging. It makes sense, as this is a pleasure vehicle targeted toward people who have spent a lot of money and want to see something shiny and perfect show up at their marina. Not like those who are receiving a new mobile crane that will immediately be put to work.

We lifted the ship from the water. For the catamarans, there were lifting hooks built in, so we used those. For this yacht, there were no hooks, so we had to cradle it. This meant that there was underwater work to do to ensure that the cradle was properly located. A diver spent quite a bit of time under the yacht. Also, we started with a spreader (that piece that holds the lifting lines apart) that seemed right but wasn’t working well, so we had to start over with a different spreader. Nothing goes as planned. Took most of a morning.

A lot of people watched this lift. I am not sure if it was because it was near Rickmers’ offices, or if the yacht builders sent a lot of people, or maybe the receiving owners were there. There was also a photographer who looked official. I had wondered where she would place herself for best possible photos, and for a while couldn’t find her. She was up in the crane! Major cool. I was jealous.

I spent some time in a very nice Seamen’s center. They are not all created equal, and this one was one of the best. I got some nerdy work done on my computer, drank a few very nice beers, and talked with some Russians (in English, somewhat embarrassingly), who were workers on a car carrier ship. They don’t get to drive the cars, darn it, a separate agency does all that in the ports. On the way back to the ship I had a nice talk with the Seamen’s center’s shuttle driver. He was American, from Des Moines, who visited Hamburg in 1972 and just never quite made his way back to America. Ha! It was fun to talk with him.

We are vertically tighter to some bridges now, because the mast on the yacht is higher than the highest points (the radar equipment and antennae) on our bridge. My eyes aren’t the best at depth perception, and already one of the bridges in the interior of the port scared me on our way out of Hamburg. On top of the yacht’s mast are some electronics and some weather monitoring equipment. I thought they were goners! I am sure that Captain has it all under control.

(Thursday, May 19th, 2016)

I needed some time with an internet connection to get Dropbox sync’d and some blog posting accomplished, so I rented a hotel room in Bremerhaven for a night. I spent an afternoon and a morning walking around before returning to the ship.

My hotel was the City Hotel Shulz near Christ Church near the middle of Bremerhaven. The hotel was exactly what I needed. The room was small but pleasant and sufficient, the WiFi was good, and the restaurant downstairs was perfect for what I needed. The young woman at the front desk had just spent a few months in San Francisco, in an English-immersion class. Small world! We talked about Market Street and the Ferry Building, and the hill up to Sutro Tower. In English!

The steeple of Christ Church was just tall enough to be seen through other buildings, and distinguished enough from nearby churches, so when I wanted to walk back to the hotel I had a reference.

Bremerhaven is a nice mid-sized town, centered around the port and shipyards. The port is large when compared to Port Manatee, but small when compared to Hamburg or Shanghai. But then most ports are small when compared to those two.

Several canals and harbor accesses wind through the town, so it was fun to look at commercial vessels and private boats and yachts docked here and there. Small parks with deep green grass were all around. Not that many people were out and about. It was windy, chilly, and spitting rain just a little bit, just enough so that one might choose to go for a walk on some other day. I did not have that choice.

I walked past the company that builds the orange emergency lifeboats that I see on almost every big ship. And a sailmaking company, and a marine radio company. In a mall there was a shop dedicated to things, like a hoodie or a bag, made from old sailcloth.

In town there were winding streets with close-connected townhouses, some of which were obviously much older than others. Being a port and a shipyard, I am sure that Bremerhaven got its share of damage during World War II. Cobblestone streets were common. Car tires make a different sound on cobblestone!

Speaking of cars, I was jealous of all the cool small (tiny, by US standards) cars from all sorts of manufacturers. We are really missing out on some practical, stylish, environmentally friendly fun. Not much bigger than Smart cars (of which there were a few to be seen), but much more sporty, and with vestigal rear seats. I saw no Hummers or Escalades. But also no hybrid Priuses (Prii?) either.

The bar/church ratio was pretty good. I won’t tell which side of zero I prefer, but some towns are very skewed. This one seemed fair to both sides. Both Octoberfest and Martin Luther are German.

Bremerhaven has several museums, a zoo, and a whole “experience” building. There were also many historical ships that one could tour. It was windy and wet outside, so although I wanted to tour some ships it didn’t sound like fun. Except for one – a submarine! So I toured the “Wilhelm Bauer”, a WWII-era U-boat. (Mr. Bauer was the inventor of the submarine in the 1800’s, according to a sign on the ship.) It never saw service, was scuttled near the end of the war, then recovered twelve years later and restored over a period of years. I am not necessarily a fan of war machines, but it was interesting to see what technology was like in the middle of the last century. When I was visiting inside, I was the only person there besides two gentlemen at the entrance desk. I felt crowded. Ha. I know I have a mild case of claustrophobia. The sub had a crew of 58. That number kept sticking in my mind. Wow.

You know those movies in which a sub captain finishes looking through the periscope, slams up the handholds as the scope starts to fall, and steps back before yelling something? Well, there is no “stepping back”. There is simply no room. The idea that there might be four or five people standing around the captain during those scenes, if repeated in a real U-boat, would mean that “face-to-face” meant that faces would almost be touching each other. But the yelling? The proximity of the periscope to the engines, and the snorkels delivering air to the engine intakes when the sub is near the surface, probably required it.

At the end of my walk I walked back to the ship, or at least back to the security gate. While waiting for a shuttle to take me back to the ship, I stared at the side of a massive car carrier, acres of flat steel. Cars and small delivery vans driving off a rear gangway. Somewhat different in scope than the “Wilhelm Bauer”.

(Wednesday, May 18th, 2016)

Monday and Tuesday we visited Bremerhaven, Germany.

We took a right turn off the North Sea just north of the English Channel and there we were! Well, maybe there was more to it than that. The North Sea was rough where we needed to pick up the pilot, so the pilot was delivered to us by helicopter! It happened so fast that I did not get to take pictures. The Captain said later that he was surprised as well. He had called to confirm that we needed a pilot, since folks on the bridge couldn’t see any boats that looked like pilot boats, and the pilot center said “12 minutes, be right there”, and in 12 minutes a helicopter was hovering over our bow, matching our speed. We didn’t even have to slow down for it. They lowered the pilot to the bow deck using a harness, and it was all over and the helicopter was headed away in about 2 minutes. Wow. Guess we can roll up that rope ladder from the side of the ship!

The seaway into Bremerhaven is wide and flat, with the channel being a narrower section, well-marked by buoys, snaking through. Often we could see sand bars close by, and many of the buoys, rather than floating, were mini-lighthouses of various shapes and sizes. The water turned from the usual dark blue and green to more brown, given the lack of depth. We had a lot of wind. There were many small farms of wind generators, including some right in port. They wouldn’t put those expensive things where wind was iffy, so I assume this place is consistently windy.

We had to make an extreme turn off the main channel to come into port, helped by tugs, and then we were facing a lock! Most of the docks are in Bremerhaven Harbor, and the water level there is higher than the channel to the North Sea, so we went through one lock to get to our berth. I have to say that one lock no longer impresses, having been through the Panama Canal. I guess I’ve become a “lock snob”, tee hee. The roadways on top of the lock doors were pretty cool, though.

In the harbor were some specialty ships that I think serve the oil rigs in the North Sea, and a few floating dry docks. Bremerhaven is a shipbuilding port.

Our heavy-lift general purpose ship was the rarity in port. The container ships go to a different part of the port, but I didn’t see many while we were there. But there were always four or five car carrier ships around, with their boxy look and extremely high sides. Looking at those ships, I wonder just how much paint is necessary to cover one side. Their names are in letters several stories high. There were parking lots all around us with new cars all in a row, along with small trucks and delivery vans. Many of the vehicles were wrapped in white, just the front and rear windows clear.

We had some ordinary cargo and some extraordinary cargo. The extraordinary cargo included two pieces of huge industrial machinery. One weighed 480 tons, the other 450 tons. Those were the heaviest lifts that I’ve seen on this trip. Both lifts were from narrow barges, and the pieces were moved to the center of the ship in a nearby hold. We used our two onboard cranes of 320 tons each, and kept the span to a minimum.

For these two lifts it took from about 6:30 in the morning to an hour or so after lunch. Setup, checking, getting everything tight and checking again, and then some very slow lifting, much slower than some other lifts I’ve watched. At this weight, if the cargo starts to swing, the effect on the crane can be large. Not good. Speed of lift is just not important, so inches at a time.

There was one incident that helped me realize how seriously they were taking these lifts. The first piece rested on some chock blocks that pinched the “feet” of the piece. On a lift like this you want the piece to be free to move side to side and back to front with the first small lift, so that you can judge the action when the lift starts in earnest. Those chock blocks were preventing a complete assessment of the initial movement. The Captain said that they needed to go. The folks in the barge said “nah, it won’t be a problem.” The Captain basically said “I am the Captain and I am responsible for this lift”. So one of our seamen hustled into our storage area, returned with a chain saw (I am not making this up – I am not that creative), lit it up, and removed the parts of the chock blocks that would prevent a full assessment. Just about 10 or 15 extra minutes, totally inconsequential to the whole lift. I learned two things: a) The Captain takes his responsibility seriously; b) We have a chainsaw on board!

On the pilot deck, watching the slow but interesting action, I had a good view of the parking lot where all the new cars were parked. I hope to annotate some photographs for a “weight and volume” comparison. I could see one section of small cars. Maybe a ton each, maybe even less, but good enough for estimates. There were about 100 cars in that section. So that’s 100 tons. One piece we lifted, especially when you include the lifting harness and cables, was about five times that. So I wonder that those big car carriers, with those big sides making them look so massive, might be carrying less actual weight than we carry. There’s a lot of air in cars and vans.

(Saturday, May 14th, 2016)

This morning we cruised up the English Channel and now we are in the North Sea. We were lucky – yesterday it rained, but today is partly cloudy, with good visibility. We came through the narrow part of the Channel and could see Calais off our starboard side and the white cliffs of Dover off our port side. Fun!

The North Sea water is a little more choppy, but not bad, and the air is cooler now.

It was busy in the Channel but not as busy as in Shanghai, for example. The difference was that ships were traveling in all directions, not just “in and out” of a harbor. Ferries were coming directly across our bow and stern. It felt busy.

We had another safety drill this afternoon. We passengers have it easy, with very few responsibilities, and it turns out that we are reasonably trainable. The only drills we need to know are the “Abandon Ship” drills, with minor variations depending on which lifeboat/raft we use. Our basic responsibilities are simple: Listen, and follow instructions!

(Saturday, May 14th, 2016)

We have some additional changes to our route. Instead of “Montoir>Bremerhaven>Antwerp>Hamburg>Genoa” we now have “Montoir>Bremerhaven>Hamburg>Antwerp>Genoa”. This affected the other passenger on board, but not me.

So I made additional progress on my series of Progress Maps. You can find them all in “Raw Photos>Cooked>Progress Maps”, in the Dropbox folders. The latest one is the most accurate, and I have marked progress assuming I next upload to the internet from Bremerhaven.

(Saturday, May 14th, 2016)

(Absolute or gradual: If Friday the 13th is unlucky, should Thursday the 12th, and/or Saturday the 14th, be a “little bit unlucky”?)

Thursday we visited Montoir, France. It was our first port after our Atlantic crossing, and so was welcome. It is sooo easy to jump rope on a non-rolling deck, but then one might feel obliged to do a few extra reps because of the lack of challenge. Not this one.

We were there only for a little while, not enough for passengers to disembark/re-embark given the distance to malls or seamen’s centers. We discharged some large airplane parts for Airbus, mostly. Guess what? The airplane parts are large but not so heavy, duh. And we did discharge one of our passengers. He’s headed on a set of trains, eventually to London. Pretty cool. We didn’t use the crane, he got himself off the ship.

We picked up the pilot at 6am, just as the sky was starting to lighten a bit. We berthed around 8, in a haze. Along the way we passed a shipyard, in which was a very large cruise ship. By “very large” I mean it dwarfed the town. I took pictures from afar. Later a fellow passenger looked it up. It was just being finished, and that day was being turned over from the shipyard to the owners. Some stats (thanks Barry!):

6,400 passengers
2,100 crew
300 meters or more in length
226,000 gross tonnage
amenities – tallest water slide, rock climbing walls, ice skating rink
~$1 billion to build

They claim “largest cruise ship in the world”.

… and there were two more under construction in the shipyard!

I imagine they have a huge amount of “keep the ship smooth at sea” equipment. I had a flash imagination of attempting a rock climb during our heavy weather in the Atlantic. Ho ho ho splash.

Berthed just ahead of us was a ferry, delivering morning commuters. The cars were leaving the ship out some huge aft doors, proceeding single-file, looking like ants leaving an anthill.

We left just before dinner, in a steady light rain, headed for the English Channel, the North Sea, and Bremerhaven. Au revoir!

(Tuesday, May 10th, 2016)

Yesterday was truly “one of those days”. For several days we’d been sailing across the Atlantic, with the Captain saying that it was unusually quiet, but that we were expecting to hit some dicey weather sooner or later.

It truly was quiet for the whole start of the voyage across. Although there were a few whitecaps in view, there were no significant swells, and not a great amount of wind. It was easy for me to jump rope on any deck I wanted, and we walked up to the bow to stare at waves, and to see some birds, some dolphins, and a flying fish. We repeated this for several days. Nice.

We had a long-delayed party on Saturday night, and some hung-over seamen on Sunday morning. Some of them were good at Karaoke. Some. In the interest of maintaining a good relationship with our Captain and Master, I can honestly report that without a doubt he participated in Karaoke. You have not lived until you hear a Pole and a Filipino pair up on a medly of some Beatles love songs.

Sunday night it got rough. We had a lot of everything: Wind, chop, swells. The ship was both rolling and pitching fore/aft, and pounding into large swells. It felt like the worst of the times in the Pacific.

The ship rolled a bit faster and with a bit more angle than in the Pacific, influenced by the fact that it was lighter (we were totally loaded across the Pacific, not so much here) and that the swells were not coming from a uniform direction.

Anyway, we had a sleep-lite night. And then a very interesting breakfast. We knew going in that breakfast was going to be a little challenging. Just pouring coffee was a feat. And we knew that our chairs might slide on the floor a bit. But. The ship rolled violently, and emptied the tables of plates, glasses, everything not in a box. We slid on our chairs until the chairs, along with all the stuff from the tables, found the starboard wall. Wheeee, crash! Then we journeyed, sliding whilst sitting in our chairs, and with all the stuff coming along, to the port wall. We did this a couple of times. “Scrambled eggs” now has an additional meaning to me.

Nobody got hurt, and we all chipped in to help clean up. We made sandwiches for lunch, and we had dinner on plates but we ate standing up. The rest of the day was mostly riding it out. The wind was too powerful to allow any venturing outdoors. I took videos – not of breakfast, but of the waves, wind, and swells. I hope some of them show the power that we sensed. I included one in the folder “Raw Photos>Cooked>Across the Atlantic”. It is a large file so watch out. To help with perspective, you can see an opening in the bottom of one of the middle cranes, lined in grey paint on the green surrounding it. That’s a passageway, about 7 feet tall. Another perspective help: We are riding high. The side of the ship is about 30 feet above the water line.

So although there were fewer rough days in number in the Atlantic, I have to say that all the way across the Pacific our food never escaped the table. So the Atlantic wins in the FoF (Food-on-Floor) roughness scale.

Then in the middle of the night Monday night it all went away. We awoke this morning to find us on relatively flat seas, no huge swells, no whitecaps to speak of, much like the days before. As I write this in the evening we’ve been at full throttle all day, I’ve been up to the bow again for much of the afternoon, and it is as if Monday’s violence never happened. There’s a smashed chair in the mess hall, and a coffee maker that won’t recover from its injuries crumpled in a corner of the galley, just in case we need reminders.

(Tuesday, May 10th, 2016)

For the first time on this entire voyage, I have fellow passengers!

For the sake of their privacy, I am not going to write too much about them, or name them. That’s what I would want for myself, so that’s what I am going to do. (As you can tell, I am not a good target for Facebook marketing, ho ho.)

We have a Canadian/American and a Dutchman on board. They both boarded in Philadelphia. They thought they were headed across the Atlantic, immediately. Surprise! Come on down to Morehead City for a spell.

The CanAm guy is a retired ex-Microsoft dude traveling the low-carbon way from British Columbia (Cortez Island, pretty cool) to London, England. He’s getting off in Montoir. This means ferry, hitchhike, train, bus, and freighter travel. He’s a senior-league soccer player, a soccer coach, and a birder.

We have, over beers, figured out what Elon Musk or Richard Branson (whoops, “Sir Richard”) needs to do to lower the carbon footprint significantly for air travel. We would rather Elon do it. He seems less egotistical than Richard Branson. If someone could point Elon at this blog post we’d appreciate it, thanks. Hint: Low-altitude turboprops with high passenger count, all “economy class”. Get to work, Elon, it is more important than the people tube from San Francisco to Los Angeles and the infrastructure is already in place. We stand ready to advise.

The Dutch guy is an artist from The Hague who is doing a circle route of his own, freighter from France to Miami, train to Boston, some form of public transport to Philadelpia, and freighter transport from Philadelphia to either Antwerp or Bremmerhaven, whichever comes first. He’s been painting a mural of the Rickmers Antwerp, surrounded by dolphins, fish, and our emergency lifeboat. It is way cooler to see than to read about. He’s been on these voyages before, several times.

Both are very good to talk with, quite fun. I’ve had to make room in my incredibly busy schedule for them. I managed.

Both of them, with only a few beers, went swimming in our pool during a party. 10 degrees Celsius. I was raised in Florida: I don’t voluntarily go in water that isn’t at least body (specifically, live body) temperature.

And, from Hamburg to Genoa, I am told that I will have company as well. We shall see!

(started Saturday, April 30th, 2016)

I am writing this in a hotel room in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, listening to wonderful harp music (Allison Vardy, “Island Suites”). I admit to distraction. And later, in a hotel room in Morehead City, North Carolina. Not as much distraction – and that will allow me to finish, tee hee. Well, not quite. I am finishing this on board, as we approach Montoir, France.

I had been visiting parents and sisters for a week, nice. I am not going to write about that, other than to say that I gave a show-and-tell at a special needs school and workplace at which Janis works in Bushnell, Florida. It was quite fun for me, and I think interesting for them. I had some volunteers ready to finish the trip with me! I didn’t do as much work on this blog as I thought I was going to do.

Then I headed up the southeast US coast, seeking to be early to Morehead City, North Carolina, to await the Rickmers Antwerp’s arrival from Philadelphia. Can’t be late! Next port: Montoir, France.

Rumor has it there will be other passengers on board. (The rumor is true!)

I seem to avoid writing about American ports. It may be that I don’t feel the need – they are US cities, after all, and that’s not the gist of this voyage or these posts. I’m going to write about Houston, New Orleans, Port Manatee, and Morehead City, all in this post – we’ll see how that goes.

Both Houston and New Orleans have a long approach from the Gulf of Mexico. There is a clear distinction when we leave deeper water and reach the various shelves that ring the Gulf. The swells basically stop, as there is no water depth to support them. The voyage from New Orleans to Port Manatee was especially calm, as we were mostly in relatively shallow water.

The approach to Houston is the Houston Ship Channel, and the channel is lined with refineries and chemical plants. We arrived and left at night, with refinery lights omnipresent. They actually look impressive, especially when you think of how much our economy depends on them. A security guard I chatted with while waiting for a ride calls this part of Texas “The Carcinogenic Coast”.

In Houston, I used the internet at the Seamen’s center for most of a day, then went shopping another day, and went to an Astros game as well. At the dock there were thousands of cars parked, still covered in plastic, having been delivered from Asia and awaiting transport to other parts of the country. Also at the Houston dock there was a railway, so heavy loads could be directly loaded onto trains.

Getting to New Orleans is via the Mississippi River Delta, and it is quite scenic. It feels very remote, and reminded me of the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam. The difference is that the Mississippi River Delta is mostly scrub brush for quite a while, while the Mekong was full of small trees. You can see over the scrub brush, to other bodies of water. It was peaceful cruising up all the bends. You can see New Orleans in the distance for quite a while, and at times it seems that the ship is traveling away from the city, not towards it. There are a lot of bends!

We had less time in New Orleans but I did go down to Bourbon Street and listened to quite a bit of good live music at a couple of small bars. It’s a small street with a lot of history. It was lively and fun even on a Monday night. We discharged our loads to both the dock on one side, and barges on the other. The dock was close to downtown, just a little ways further up the Mississippi.

Getting to Port Manatee reminded me of getting to Panama City. It isn’t so much a long narrow approach as it is finding your way around a bay. Port Manatee is on the extreme southwest part of the huge Tampa Bay. The port itself, and the approach to it, is very scenic, with lush islands and lots of green in the distance. The port itself is small, and so it doesn’t seem to interfere much with the nature preserves nearby.

Since I was being picked up I didn’t spend much time in Port Manatee. I did get to walk from the ship to the Seamen’s Center there, so I took some rare (for me) photos of the ship from dockside. We discharged two yachts directly from the ship into the bay, and we also discharged some very large pieces of equipment from the top of our hatches – a few 2-crane lifts, fun to watch.

For Morehead City, I wasn’t on the ship when they approached it, and we left before dawn, early in the morning, so I cannot say what the approach or exit really looks like. The port itself is scenic, with a marina nearby, and also some barrier islands that are partially populated. There is a military presence at the port because it is near some bases, Camp Lejune being the one I noticed the most on the drive up from Florida.

At the dock at Morehead City we discharged a “house” that we carried from Shanghai. It is a control room for one of those massive wind generators. The ship next to us was discharging what looked like a set of huge tubes. They are the support parts for those generators. When I say “massive”, I should explain – the control room, which goes up on top, is more than two stories tall and weighs close to 100 tons. And that’s just the “little piece” that you see connected to the center of the blades way up high. Yet another education in sizes. We discovered that Amazon is putting 104 of these out in the Atlantic, near the Carolinas coast. Our transport and discharge of the control tower (another 2-crane lift, this one with one of our cranes and one of theirs) was also fun to watch. It took a while to coordinate and execute.

In “Raw Photos > Cooked” I put some captioned photos for all these visits.