Author: jrkast@gmail.com

(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.

(Saturday, April 23rd, 2016)

… if I can take liberties and claim that riding as a passenger on a freighter ship constitutes “action”.

I am sitting at a kitchen counter at my parents’ house in The Villages, Florida. With a pretty good WiFi arrangement, I hope to make some blog posts and see that photos in “Raw Photos” are updated.

So you don’t have to go searching for the link to “Raw Photos”, here it is again:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/48tdqxoywtjkj6g/AACY-cCt-BHG92T3xtKwzUTwa?dl=0

There are “Raw” (no editing, only a few deletions), and “Cooked” (edited, many captioned) pictures under “Raw Photos” now. “Raw Photos” is now the wrong name for the highest level folder, but I didn’t want to change anything and break the link.

Thursday, I disembarked at Port Manatee, Florida, on the southwest coast of Tampa Bay. My sister and brother-in-law were very kind to come pick me up and deliver me to central Florida. I’ll be visiting for a week, and getting some errands done. Then I’ll drive up to Morehead City, North Carolina, and reboard as the ship heads out to Montoir, France.

During the time I have good internet here I’ll post a little more about the US ports and edit a few sets of pictures. For a few days there’ll be stuff trickling onto the blog or into “Raw Photos”.

(Saturday, April 16th, 2016)

(With apologies to Terry for whom the Who is a boo.)

Our Captain had “one of those long days” from Tuesday night until Wednesday night. By “long day” I mean he worked all those hours. Some of it was expected and some not.

We approached Houston on Tuesday night, took on a harbor pilot at about 10pm, and went up the Houston Ship Channel, past a dozen or more refineries and all sorts of docks, until berthing at around 4:30am on Wednesday morning. I was on deck for a little while up the channel but went back to sleep for a bit when no pictures were going to be good. Also, refineries don’t interest me that much – I have seen my share.

We all had to get up early to meet the customs and immigration officials, especially those of us wanting to go ashore later. I also needed to confirm the laws applicable to my upcoming dis- and re-embarking.

So far so good. Then we learned that, instead of one expected inspection, we were lucky enough to get three!

Inspection #1: Coast Guard. We learned about this because they were waiting for us. No big deal, and in fact we were overdue for such an inspection. The Coast Guard is supposed to inspect us once a year and it had been more than that. The last time that we were available they were busy. So this time for sure. Everything went fine. (More on the Coast Guard later.)

The Coast Guard checks environmental compliance, quarantine compliance, dangerous cargo, general crew conditions, and general ship safety conditions.

Inspection #2: Inspectors representing our flag country, Marshall Islands, paid a visit. These inspections also happen once a year, but not with as much enforced regularity as the Coast Guard.

The flag country is where our ship is registered, and to whom we pay fees and taxes. Their inspection is just to see that the ship that is here is the same ship that has been registered, and is in good operating condition, and that we are using it the way that we promised to use it – for example, for a commercial shipping vessel.

Inspection #3: This one was the inspection that we had anticipated, and was from an inspection agency representing the Merchant Marine (all commercial ships in the world), checking on our compliance with various world-wide safety and operational measures. There are several applicable acronyms of regulations they enforce.

All three of these inspections are valid. But the coincidence of all three happening in the same morning, and that morning being one in which many of the officers were up all night already, was a burden. You know how hard it can be to be polite when you are totally void of sleep. And some of the inspectors, from what I heard, had that sort of “positional power” personality.

I got off the ship as soon as I could (I’ll write about that in another post) so I missed the crowd on board. Except for the Coast Guard. Serious looking folks. And the first woman to be on board since I got on in Singapore.

Along with all that was the usual business of why we came in the first place – to work with the stevedores, our supercargo people, our on-site agent, and various shipping companies, to get started with the work of discharging cargo from our ship. Get those cranes moving.

So Wednesday was a super-busy day. All inspections went well.

Then on Friday late afternoon, 24 hours before we were due to depart, we got a surprise. The New Orleans Coast Guard (the Houston Coast Guard folks warned us about them) decided that since we didn’t have a working bow thruster, we were not allowed to enter New Orleans. What!? The Captain was livid.

Our German offices are long since closed, and it is a weekend. We are due to arrive in New Orleans late on Sunday, or maybe sometime Monday.

This is both serious and misguided. A bow thruster, while convenient, is not necessary, and is not listed as a device that needs inspected, and is not on any inspection checklist. The only way that the New Orleans Coast Guard learned about it was that we filed a report listing equipment under repair. We are receiving spare parts in Savannah and will fix the bow thruster then.

Basically, if we had a bow thruster, and if a docking maneuver was relatively easy and in calm water and with calm wind, we could skip the forward tugboat and get by with only an aft tug. Without the bow thruster we use two tugs. That is completely normal. Many ships our size don’t have bow thrusters at all – it is a convenience.

So we had to wake up executives in Germany to craft a suitably polite but firm response. Today (Saturday) at noon we got the reply from a high-ish person in the Coast Guard (notably, not from the New Orleans Coast Guard) – “bow thruster not required – approved for New Orleans”. Nothing but that. So, off we go, in a few hours.

(Wednesday, April 13th, 2016)

That’s a great Bowie song. If I have you humming that for the rest of the day, I won’t apologize.

Well, I am learning about the US laws concerning US citizens traveling on foreign vessels. I learn and obey. (I am saluting as I type, which is difficult.)

I had been making plans to take a little time off the ship, for two excursions. The first plan was to disembark in Houston, and re-embark in New Orleans. I planned to drive to New Orleans and spend more time there than in Houston, and to enjoy a hotel and some Cajun food.

The second plan was to visit my family in central Florida. I planned to disembark in Port Manatee, then re-embark in Savannah. It’s a piece of cake to get to Savannah.

Those plans are shown on the map labeled “Map 2016-04-06” in “Raw Photos>Cooked>Progress Maps”.

There are two laws that thwarted those plans.

The “Jones Act”: A US citizen cannot be transported from a US port to another US port on a foreign vessel. This is to help tilt the table in favor of US carriers, so foreign-flagged vessels, paying fewer taxes, cannot take ferry business away from the US carriers. Okay, I get that.

We were hoping that I could claim that I was being transported from Xingang to Genoa, really, and who cared what happened in between. That was our argument. We lost that argument. So, the land trip from Houston to New Orleans was squashed, because the ship trip from New Orleans to Port Manatee puts myself and Rickmers in violation of the Jones Act.

Okay. So I am in Houston for a bit, quite all right. I might go visit NASA. Or go watch the Royals beat up on the Astros.

While my agent was discussing my case with the immigration officials, I said “well that’s okay, the one land trip from Port Manatee to Savannah was the one I really wanted, so as to see my family”.

The immigration folk said “Wait a minute, that trip is in violation of the PVSA.”

Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? But also, of course, “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” I’m glad they caught it.

The PVSA is the Passenger Vessel Services Act. It has the concept of an “intact” voyage and a “broken” voyage.

For the voyage to remain “intact”, the passenger must depart on the same vessel on which he/she arrived, at each port. The passenger can do all sorts of things in port, even stay in hotels, etc., but must get back on board in that same port.

If the passenger does not depart on the vessel upon which he/she arrived, this “breaks” the voyage. Once the voyage is “broken”, the passenger cannot rejoin the vessel until the vessel is at its last US port, such that now the vessel is sailing to a foreign port. If the passenger does this, there is no PVSA violation.

Whew. I guess this is also protection for US interests somehow, although I don’t quite understand how much more it does than the Jones Act. No sense to dwell, though, ’tis wha’ ’tis.

Oh. We also changed our routes slightly. We go to Philadelphia earlier, and leave US from Morehead City. We also changed the order of stops in Europe slightly.

So, I am going to disembark in Port Manatee, and catch up to the Rickmers Antwerp in Morehead City. I will skip the visits to Savannah and Philadelphia. Not too bad – I had wanted to visit Savannah, had never been there, but I have been to Philadelphia many times. I need to figure out the “how and when” of travel to Morehead City, but it is not difficult.

These new plans are shown on the map labeled “Map 2016-04-13”, also in “Raw Photos>Cooked>Progress Maps”.

This voyage has been all about change. That fact is interesting on its own.