(Wednesday, February 9th, 2016)
The simple view: We show up at port, dock, unload, load, undock, and exit. Of course it’s not that simple. Our experience at Ho Chi Minh City is a good example of complications that add time.
One result of this experience is that I did not visit Ho Chi Minh City, just looked at it for a night, docked nearby. Hence the title. More on that later.
After a blustery day and night we arrived at the mouth of the Mekong Delta sometime late in the morning of February 7th, maybe 11am. We were due to head up into the delta, connecting with the Saigon River on up to Ho Chi Minh City, which used to be called Saigon as well.
But wait. There was no room at the docks for us. Just like an airline organizing gates for its flights, shipping companies vie for dock space, and we had to wait. So we anchored, and waited. We thought we were going to wait for a few hours, and pick up a pilot, and make our way up to the city in the late afternoon. It is about a 4 hour trip up the river.
Nothing all day. We gently rocked at anchor in the South China Sea, changing our heading with the tide and wind, with a couple of oil platforms visible nearby. The weather improved, we were in sight of land, and we were going nowhere. It turns out that we now had dock space, but no pilot. We waited on the pilot. Preparing for evening, the crew did some special locking. They closed various doorways and put grates over some ladderways, so that someone crawling onto our ship while we were at anchor could not get into our main cabin area, even if they boarded the cargo part of the vessel. I guess they’ve had some experience with robbers coming on board a ship at anchor at night, within sight of land.
8am the next day, February 8th. Still at anchor. Finally, about 2:30pm, a pilot boarded and we started up the delta.
Scenic. Too many photo ops! Lots of trees right up to the waterline, dense green far into the distance, waterways going every which way. Having a pilot made perfect sense for this trip.
We passed some outlying structures, probably some river traffic control stations, something like that. We passed some villages. One riverside village in particular had some strange structures, slots instead of windows in multi-story buildings that looked like small apartments. From the village came a loud sound of birds screeching. It had to be really loud in the village if we could clearly hear it on board, in the middle of the river. I took a video to see if I could capture the sounds. I am not sure it turned out – the engine and sea noise compete. My first thought was simply to Google it. Whoops, that’s a luxury we take for granted.
It was fun to continue to approach Ho Chi Minh City. We could see it in the distance, many tall apartment buildings and then tall downtown buildings. It is 3.5 million people, and looks it. The way there was full of 180 degree turns in the winding waterway. We could see approaching vessels because their towers giraffed over the foliage. It was as if we were all in a maze, but cheating by looking over the top.
We went under a bridge, pretty cool, looked tight to me. The pilot took us right down the middle. A day or so later I asked the Captain how close we came. Well, we are, with our current load, 39+ meters above waterline to the radar and antennae, call it 40. The bridge, on our charts, shows as having a clearance, dead center, of 43 meters. So hey, maybe 10 feet to spare, what’s the problem? Tee hee. The Captain said that there are bridges near Houston and near Philadelphia that are much closer. He said he thinks that we get under the Houston bridge with only a meter to spare. Duck.
So we docked, which took a little while. It was now 7:30pm, and we were organizing to go onshore. I needed to get a Vietnam visa, which our port agent was to arrange. I understood that we’d go through the process when I arrived, and that he would lead me through it. $120, kind of expensive for a short visit, but okay, whatever. I casually asked the captain how long we were staying, assuming I had a day, maybe. He said 5am. I said “day after tomorrow, right?” He said “nope, we only have unloading mostly, and this agent says we’ll be done tonight”. And, the agent said that since it was Chinese New Year being celebrated, I had better make sure of my taxi, and that there was a midnight curfew that the police were enforcing.
So I didn’t go. I figured that I wouldn’t get a taxi ’till after 8:30 at best (it was already after 8), would spend another $40 or so in cab fare, only to stand in Saigon for an hour or so and then go back. Not worth it. The agent was mad at me because he’d done some preliminary work that we hadn’t asked for, and now was wasted. The Captain felt bad but there was nothing he could do. So No Chi Minh City for me. I was disappointed, but this is what I knowingly signed up for. A motto that seemed to fit: “Keep Small Things Small.” In the context of this trip, this was surely small.
It also meant that I could not get connected to some good-enough wifi, so blog posts and Dropbox uploads and Googling “birds on the Mekong” must wait until Shanghai, in a week or so.
The unloading schedule was basically held. The next morning we were done by around 6am with nothing left to do but to park the cranes, close the hatch doors, lash some things to the top of the hatch doors, that sort of thing. We were ready to pull up the gangway by 7:30 or so, and I could see that the crew weren’t hurrying. And then we waited. I thought we were waiting on the pilot again, but this time was a little different. The Captain said that today the low tide was especially low, and there wasn’t sufficient depth for us to leave quite yet. We are just about the biggest ship that fits up this river. It is important to keep the keel out of the mud. So we waited until a little after noon.
Where we were docked, the width of the river is about 700 feet. Our ship is about 200 meters long, so well over 600 feet, eh? When we docked, we pulled up alongside the dock and had the tugboats push us sideways into the dock. But now we needed to turn around. So, according to the Third Mate, the Pilot had to check to make sure of traffic heading our way, as we were about to block the whole river for that time (maybe 10-15 minutes) that we were turning around. From my vantage point it looked pretty tight against some small docks off our bow. You can’t see the front of the ship from the Pilot Deck. It looked tight. And our arc put our aft close to a neighbor ship. But no worries, and we got going. And it was correct that we needed to check for traffic. Seems that many ships, including a couple of cruise ships along with other freighters, had to wait for the tide. Now the waterway was busy.
Out we went, under the bridge with no worries, down the delta, about 24 hours after we had just been there. The birds were still noisy.
We dropped the pilot onto his little boat at about 5pm on February 9th and headed back into the South China Sea on our way to Shanghai. So – we spent much of February 7th, 8th, and 9th here, much of it waiting, and did all our “dock work” from about 9pm to 6am in one night. I am starting to understand freighter schedules better.
These pilots were on board for 4 or 5 hours for each trip. The pilot at Laem Chabang in Thailand was on board for about 15 minutes, just time enough to see us clear of the dock, then he got off. Singapore was about the same as Laem Chabang, maybe 30 minutes. I asked the Captain if this was an especially long piloting. He said yes but – the Houston ship channel takes more than 6 hours of piloting, the Mississippi delta channel to New Orleans takes 12 hours, and the channel to Philadelphia takes 9. Wow. And we have a cabin here, for 2 people, called the Pilot Cabin. It is used during the Panama Canal stretch and the Suez canal stretch, during which we have 2 pilots tag-teaming for us on those really long ones.