Category: freight

(Tuesday, June 7th, 2016)

Tomorrow I get on a plane that starts my trip home.

This’ll probably be my last post directly related to the freighter trip. I could change my mind, but I am not likely to try to make some big statement. That’s just not me.

So… I have had a nice week in Genoa! It’s a very good city for walking around, and I did so. Sometimes in sun, sometimes in the rain. I had run low on energy. Leaving the ship after so long a time left me a bit disconnected. I decided not to try for too much, not to see “everything possible” before getting on a plane, but to just relax and enjoy.

Each day I picked a couple things I wanted to see or do, and set out with those simple goals. I allowed myself to get diverted, which was easy. I walked, sat and wrote in my journal, ate a bit, had one of several thousand cups of coffee of differing styles, and walked some more.

I took many pictures, and looking back at them, I realize how many of them are in “portrait” mode vs. “landscape”. When you walk in the center of Genoa, you are almost always in an urban canyon of some sort. It is so unusual to a Floridian turned Phoenician, and even San Francisco doesn’t have that sense. The walking spaces in the old town are only wide enough for walking, and the buildings are several stories high, so narrow canyons are the norm. There are intersections and all that, and it is easy to get lost. But not really. Walking for just a little more in any direction either gets you to the harbor, or to a plaza, from which you can find your bearings.

I also realize that I have a ways to go as a photographer, and that my normal cameras (my point and shoot camera, and my phone camera, which is what I used in Genoa) try a little too hard at making everything just so, bright like a sunny day. And so the slight darkness in the canyons doesn’t come out well. I might try adjusting some photos so that they “feel right”.

I have a point of pride, totally accidental: A woman asked me for directions in Italian, and when I spoke she answered in English saying that I looked Italian. Ha! In the end, though, I was happy that I actually could help her with directions! It turns out that she accidentally asked me for the location of a particular plaza that I had been using as my personal reference, because I knew how to get home from there. Just lucky. So I helped an Italian tourist in Italy. Cool.

I will caption some photos for the “Cooked” section, but I am not going to try to name each building or discuss its significance. I only sort of care about that stuff. There are directions to a place claimed to be Christopher Columbus’ birthplace. Like Mao’s tomb, I am not really interested.

Something that was impressive to me was how much a city like Genoa was thriving, as long ago as the 1500s. Many of the largest mansions, an “embassy row”, some huge cathedrals, castles and forts defending the port, already existed then. I can imagine the elite in their carriages, now 500 years ago (think about that for a minute), leaving the opera, coming home to their in-town estates, then going to church the next day. I know that Rome, “just down the shoreline”, scoffs at mere half-millenia, but I am still impressed by Genoa. When Columbus left, he left from a thriving city, not a startup.

I took one excursion out of town, on a tip from Duane and Kathy, Italianaires Supremo (<– fake Italian). I took the train to Monterosso and then hiked to Vernazza. That’s a part of a longer hike connecting five small towns nestled beneath the steep hills on the coast. “Scenic” doesn’t do it justice. The hike was as beautiful as those along the California coast, and with these little old towns along the way.

I only did one part. I guess the writeups say that this part is a difficult section, but it wasn’t really that bad. Except that, instead of walking back to Monterosso, my knees, once they saw the train depot and learned about the easy intercity train, went all Italian on me and went on strike. I could have forced the issue, but it would have been an ugly scene. I decided to give in to their demands.

Okay, that is it. I will be updating the “Cooked” section with some photos for Genoa and Monterosso/Vernazza, and I will continue to work on “chapters” of the blog book. If/when I get the blog book to a good state, I will put it on the blog site, so you don’t need a Dropbox link to see it.

This trip is done. I am now mostly focused on getting on the airplane first thing tomorrow morning. The Rickmers Antwerp, as we speak, has already visited a couple more ports. They are, after all, at work!

Thanks again! Ta ta for now.

(June 1st, 2016)

Well well well I have disembarked, with all my luggage and memories. I have become used to being on a ship, and being at a port, and having some identity there. This time I am not going back on board. I am, once again, a civilian. A tourist, in Europe for a few days, headed home.

On board, we had communications systems failures over the last few days, so the first things I must do in Genoa are still trip-related. Find hotel rooms, get trains and planes organized, that sort of thing. I am headed to the US East Coast to see Terry and Emma, but I am not flying out as soon as possible. Our timing is such that I can be a little lazy in returning.

I am not sure of my schedule or WiFi availability, so I cannot promise a blog update until I get back to Phoenix, sometime in the middle of June. I might do better than that, and I want to wrap it up before it goes stale.

I have been trying to put pieces of the blog into a more printable form. My mom says that she prefers to read things and look at things that way. She’s not so comfortable with devices. She’s likely not the only one. So if you look at “Blog Book” in the “Cooked” section of “Raw Photos”, you’ll see a growing collection of hopefully printable .pdfs whose file names force a kind of chapter-by-chapter sort. I’ll keep adding to them. Eventually I hope to make a printable book of them. Mostly it will be a picture book.

I have had a good time. It was longer than optimum, but I did get a good sense of the time it takes to travel over our world using the oceans. I also got a beginner’s sense of the freighter industry. I met many people, I saw a lot, I learned a lot. I won’t do it again, it was too long for that, but I feel fortunate to have done it.

In “The Innocents Abroad”, about 150 years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice.” We could all help the world a little bit by widening, rather than narrowing, our sense of community.

Thanks, readers, for hanging in there with me! For many of you, I will see you soon!

(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.