Early this morning the Cuxhaven pilot boat loomed out of the mist around our stern to pick up the disembarking pilot. Called Lotse in German, Lots in Swedish. All these names are derived in some form from Lodestone, or leading stone referring to magnetised rocks which when suspended indicate magnetic north. And so you had a compass, modern navigation was born, after that you had pilots.
The pilots that fly planes are more common in the public eye but they got the name from the floating type.
But truth be told we had it first!
Below the SWATH pulls up alongside, 10 knots speed. And another sucessful pilot transfer takes place.
Tug Tytan assisting this morning.
The ship was approaching the port of Gdansk this morning, and I went up to the bridge for the usual procedure of pilot boarding. On the electronic chart screen I saw a notation written in manually “Water Brick” by the entrance to the port. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what a water brick was supposed to be, some building material used by Inuit to build igloos? It was escaping me but I had a rare flash of lateral thinking and I changed the reading order of the 2 words, so “water brick” became “brick water”, then I realised that it should have been “breakwater”. My navigator a non-native English speaker , or for that matter speller had made a slight error.Isn’t it interesting how the order in which we say words can change their meaning completely as in the above breakwater or waterbreak case, another example of breaks and whether fore or aft of a word is wind, a wind break is something for stopping wind, but break wind well you just can’t stop that always. I remember reading about a Captain on a certain British vessel that had broken wind during the manouvering and pilotage of his vessel, the smell being so violent that the bridge had to be evacuated. All hands ran out on the bridge wings pilot and all waiting for the smell to diminish. Subsequently the the unmanned vessel crashed into the breakwater, which was made of big granite blocks and not water bricks.
“Flintercarrier” entering Grangemouth docks.
I had my first experience of “Level Gates” and straight through at Grangemouth locks. We let go at a few minutes before high tide, and the pilot asked me if I would “take her into the lock”, I said I would and we proceeded to make way towards the 31m wide lock entrance, the ship being just shy of 23m wide. So plenty room to play with. As we arrived at the first set of lock gates I noticed that the gates at the other end of the lock started opening as the river level was the same as the dock level, (normally you have to wait inside the closed lock until equalisation is achieved) the pilot turned to me and said “well, there’s a first for me, straight through cap’n”, and continued “ye’ll have ta ge her a wee kick more to get her through by the way” so I applied more pitch on the engine which the ship seemed to enjoy thoroughly and with a few nudges on the thruster and rudder here and there we slid through the locks in no time. As we exited the pilot noted his appreciation of my conning skills by saying “nae bother”. In other words I didn’t leave any paint on the granite walls of the lock.The best part of the job for me is just arriving and berthing, and letting go at the end, the manouvreing part.
Astern view of the “Wheel”
The Forth and Clyde rivers are connected by a canal called just that The “Forth & Clyde Canal”, and just outside Falkirk there is another connection to the “Union canal” with a most peculiar looking mechanism called “The Falkirk Wheel” a fairly recent addition to the landscape, in the old days there was a series of locks which fell into disrepair and they came up with this device for linking the two. I didn’t see it in action, I arrived at closing time (story of my life!) but a friend has been and he described it thus “I went on the tour, lots of fun at 5mph.”
There is no straight through here folks unless your vessel can fly. Anyway if you’re in Scotland and are passing Falkirk, look it up fascinating sight.
Below is a dusk shot of one of the old lock gates on the Forth & Clyde Canal, now only used for pleasure barges these old canals were the goods transport infrastructure of the industrial revolution. Now we have motorways and trucks and containers. Look at the top photo.
Lock 14 on the Forth & Clyde Canal
A view of the telegraph by night
Once on nights, always on nights. There is a tendency to end up on a run of nights for no other good reason than that’s just the way it goes, and no matter how much rest you get during the day, nothing beats a proper nights sleep. The engines are about to rumble to life, it’s 4.30 in the AM and I have a few minutes before the Rotterdam pilot boards for departure.
The other day we had the first real fire alarm of the trip, it went off in the middle of the night, luckily we were all awake and it wasn’t a real fire, just the toaster doing very well done toast and producing large volumes of smoke, one of the anonymous crew was responsible i.e. nobody owned up, but somebody did it….all the forensic was burned to a crisp in the toaster and I don’t know if you can lift prints from bread anyway.
Everyone charged to muster within seconds which is always encouraging, self preservation helps of course, the cadets ran up to the bridge with me, both looking nervous and edgy, the smell of smoke can do that to you, I wasn’t exactly cool & the gang myself until the reason was identified. (It’s the f..cking toaster again…) A collective sigh of relief went out silently over the ship.
One of the cadets red faced later came up to me, I thought he was going to own up to the toast….but no, he had been surfing a dodgy site on the net and just as a warning came up from “websense” about banned sites the bells went off, he thought that the alarm was because of him! Ah yes I thought to myself I might have overexaggerated in my introduction speech to the cadets about how much control big brother exerts!
Radar speed & position input
Time to breathe some life back into this blog as promised in last years final posting. January was not a great month for me so I wasn’t in the mood for any attempts at wit on the internet, I took a few photos which will be put up here eventually. So the end of February is the start of the new decade for this periodically updated blog, I’m back at sea my home from home with my second family, who welcomed me back like the prodigal son without the slaughter of any fatted calf but with plenty of enthusiasm which warmed the cockles of my heart and brought a hint of a tear to my glass eye. A karaoke session was ordered and plenty crooning ensued, murdering many an Engelbert Humperdink ballad and a few versions of the now apparently dangerous “My way”.
For all the great welcome I received coming back the farewells were hard on leaving my home and the mood on the way to airport early on a cold January morning was low. My fellow passengers on the transport bus to the plane were mostly men, middle aged and bored looking, until the last minute when 8 55+ gold chained slick backed tanned white toothed Rolex wearing chaps fell onto the bus laughing and grunting all half drunk at 7 in the am, there appeared to be one leader who was more tanned and had more hair oil and a bigger Rolex than the rest he was a good foot shorter than his com padres and seemed to have a Napoleon complex, he proceeded to tell jokes and the others howled with unfunny cackles that had the empty echo of canned laughter. Their high spirits didn’t raise mine. On the plane one of them wanted my newspaper, he said “you can give me that when you’re finished with it” near suffocating me in whisky fumes and cigar breath, anyone else in the world and I would have gladly obliged but some divil rose up inside of me and refused, he looked momentarily perplexed, but he moved on down to his seat. I should have just given him the stupid paper, I got more annoyed by him than he by me.
The plane was late taking off prompting the French air hostess to move me to the very front of the plane so I’d be first off because of my short connection, she gave me instructions and said you’ll have to move quickly or you might miss your connection, so when the ground staff finally got the stairs to the door of the plane in Paris I was off like a bat outta hell, of course the next flight was from another terminal meaning a bus ride, I arrived at the passport control and they ushered me through, another staff member showed me to the bus and there I waited for it to move away. And waited. Until it filled up with all of my fellow passengers, and waited until my 8 shiny friends finished their cigars and climbed on all happy out.I probably would never have made it with or without the Las Vegas 8.
I duly missed my connection at Paris CDG so I had a 6 hours of terminal 2 watching the world go by. The world literally passed by, all shapes and sizes colours and creeds going to the four corners of the planet. I took photos of the architecture and the furniture and a few people too…
Baggage trolleys awaiting usage
Young Japanese woman avoiding the airport air.
Eventually I got my connection and I have sea views as I write. OK that’s it for today, more installments on the way!
Recent Comments