Archive for the 'Maritime' Category

Pilot by night in the German Bight

Night light

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.

SWATH Duhnen

Snow, storms and seasickness.

snow in the searchlight

The picture is taken off the coast of Norway, Utsira to be precise and we had a hell of a night that went on and on. Rolling and sliding, the picture captures the moment fairly well. I wasn’t sick in the vomiting sense, but by Jaysus I was tired. Some of the boys were looking a bit green around the gills after the longest of nights, each battling his own private battle in his cabin, trying to sleep, moving onto the daybed or lying on the deck wedged into a corner, meanwhile outside the sea was boiling and churning and the sky was full of snow.

It’s not a great time of year to be trading in the North Sea or indeed any latitude North of Gibraltar, better to be “Pope Gregory IX aboard his steamship The Saucy Sue currently wintering in Montego Bay with the English Cricket XI and the Balinese Goddess of Plenty”, oh hang on plagiarism from Black Adder goes Forth there.

2009 has been a fairly sparse blogging year for me, with posts coming few and far between. I’ve had a lot on my plate in real life so my contribution to the interweb has taken a second or third place. Despite that I continue to get visitors and comments so in 2010 I will be up and running hopefully with a few more posts and photos to keep you all entertained and informed. The job is serious and the sea can be unforgiving but the sailors are all people with lives and stories, I’ll try to continue to give you a bit of a taste of their story here.

Anyway thanks to all readers for all the comments and encouragement in 2009. Best wishes to you all for 2010.

Night Moves

ships passing in the night

Night moves, a container feeder ship approaches us and passes within a few metres before moving on west towards Kiel. Ships passing in the night, you can’t see anybody on the bridge, during the day it is customary to greet the other ships with a wave, but at night there is silence in the darkness.
This particular night there wasn’t total silence as the German pilots and helmsmen were listening to the Bundesliga football on the radio all in German of course but the shouting and cheering has the same sound! I was going to ask who was winning, but not knowing who was playing made me decide against joining in on the sports.

And the ship steamed on through the canal into the night.

Ships passing in the night

Harbour View

Harbour view

The white ship to the left is an Oceanographic research survey vessel “Akademik Sergey Vavilov” named after a Russian/Soviet physicist, the ship has in more recent times been employed as a luxury cruiser to the Antarctic at USD $5000 a pop. On the right is the sailing vessel “Kruzenshtern ” minus half of the foremast which apparently came undone on a recent cruise near the US coast in a violent storm, I don’t think anyone was hurt fortunately.

Our informative pilot gave us a little history lesson about the sailing ship, and how she came to be a Russian ship as war reparation from the Germans after WW2.

She was called “Padua” from 1926 to 1946 and then named “Kruzenshtern” after Adam Johann von  Krusenshtern who completed the first Russian sponsored circumnavigation of the world between 1802 and 1806. He was a Baltic German of Swedish descent who worked for the Tsar and the Soviets named a ship after him.

GPS dependancy

Vernier

I read with interest an article about GPS at Panbo.com which started me thinking about how much GPS there is these days, my mobile phone has a GPS with Google maps, you can get a tag for your dog or pet with a GPS locater. Cars have GPS navigators, hill walkers, mountain climbers, arctic explorers, jungle adventurers literally every man and woman and his/her dog has GPS these days. It’s all GPS.

Now I can remember the days when it was new to ships and had just been downgraded in classification from the US military for use in civilian applications for navigation of commercial vessels. The units were bulky and broke down regularly and we used to check the accuracy of the GPS by comparing our celestial observations with the GPS, the celestial observation being the more accurate of the two. Close to land the GPS was turned off and one navigated with the radar and visual bearings….mark one eyeball method being used too. Surprisingly enough we managed to get in and out of port without any problems, and the world kept turning. In the Red Sea, you would get calls from Greek ships on the VHF radio asking “have you GPS?” and “what is your position?” the standard answer being “on the bridge….”

It didn’t take too long before GPS was being used to test the accuracy of celestial observations, although at the turn of the millenium it looked bad for GPS for a while because of the millennium bug but the clock kept ticking and the world kept turning and the GPS kept spitting out positions with lots of decimal places. I don’t think that many officers on ships deep sea know how to use the sextant any more or where it is, or what it is….something from the old days anyway. You have an entire generation of deck officers who know how to plot a position from a GPS, but who don’t really know where they are or where they are going to, or what the next course will be, or what the ETA is….maybe not that bad but sometimes I wonder!

Anyway this article mentions delays in implementing upgrades and even suggests an entire collapse of the system, shock horror, the world would be full of defunct electronic receivers and a lot of people who were suddenly lost, not knowing where they were going to or coming from, or where the dog was or what street they were on, and “map reading” what is that some kind of 20th century thing?

I don’t think we are that close but you can hear the phrases “who would have thought it could happen ?” and “GPS failure creates havoc on road networks, drivers completely lost….”

Time to dust off the sextant methinks……or who knows where we will end up!

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