Published September 8, 2009
in Container, China, Europe, TV, ship spotting, photos, From the ship, Shipping, photo, The 80's and On the ship.
NYK Vesta on the Elbe
The container ship was so big it nearly didn’t fit into my widest angle, plenty flat screen televisions on the way from China to Europe and lots of other necessities for modern life. Because we all need those big flat television devices, how did we ever manage when the telly took up so much space, in fact I just bought one the other day, only because the CRT tube telly we had died completely. It seems that I’m already totally out of date as I purchased an LCD TV, the IN thing is LED TV, I am so out of fashion! My last TV was bought in the 1980’s and was a super modern device back then with a remote control and teletext, it even had a SCART contact!!! It lasted the best part of 25 years. Well done LUXOR! We’ll see how many decades my new flat beauty lasts before the pixels die.
Sunset over Immingham’s industrial landscape.
Grab bucket in b/w
Tug Switzer Josephine waiting for her next assignment.
Buckets and cranes waiting silently on an early Saturday morning.
Published April 4, 2009
in Pilot, ship spotting, Warships, Navy, photos, UK, From the ship, Grey Funnel, Maritime, England and On the ship.
The Royal Navy’s newest ship on trials off the coast of the Isle of Wight a few weeks ago. I could say I delayed posting for reasons of national security but that would be a load of shite, every man and his dog has a camera these days and you only have to look on flickr or any of the other social network sites to find acres of photos of everything. There are plenty of pictures of the derring-do Daring around, so much for the tag of stealth ship on that count. I got 88000 hits on google for “HMS Daring” and a lovely link on Wikipedia
The stealth refers to the shape of the hull which reflects radar signals at an angle either into the sea or up into the sky and not back to the enemy radar. You can see the angles in the hull shape which this theory is based on, however our radar showed a nice healthy target echo as she passed by, which means we either have a friendly radar or it was too close. I’m guessing the stealth capabilities mean that it can get within shooting distance and deliver a missile to an unsuspecting enemy before it is seen on a shore based radar station or from patrol ships. These days, the places that this ship will be deployed probably won’t have great detection equipment anyway, like Somalia and so on.
Another photo below with the Southampton Pilot boat in the forewater to give an indication of scale.
The Netherlands coastguard ship “Frans Naerebout” heading back out to sea again with a few buoys for repositioning. We were alongside near Flushing for about 30 hours and this lad was back and forth at least twice in the time we were there.
Note the hull markings are not entirely unlike the US Coast Guard.
Kustwacht The website link.
The Barque Mircea, seen in the Mediterranean the other day. She was motoring as can be seen by the lack of canvas and most likely heading for her home port of Constanta, Romania. Not looking too bad for a 70 year old ship too. Built in 1938 at the famous or notorious Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, she is the sister ship (among others) of the Nazi Kreigsmarines Gorch Fock built 1933 and taken by the Soviets after WW2, the Soviets even took Mircea for a while after WW2 but returned it to the Romanian Navy.
Source; Wikipedia which doesn’t cite any sources, but I know a few guys from Constanta who were able to tell me about her.
Mircea Homepage in Romanian
Romanian Navy Homepage
Romanian isn’t a far stretch from Italian, and is a Latin language so deciphering the homepages isn’t entirely impossible.
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