(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!