Scandlines ferry “Hamlet”
Admitting to ones owns failings can be difficult, it is so much easier to spot the failures in others. So I usually take the easy option and concentrate on others. But some things just can’t be ignored, I always thought of myself as the very paragon of cultural knowledge, coming from Wexford and all with the festival and being immersed in Opera and Classical music at home. Even at school English literature coming out of my ears or so I thought, maybe I should have been listening more. Instead I got thrown out of Honours English for reading Othello with a funny voice and forgetting my book on purpose so I would have to share with one of my cronies. Holy God we gave those poor teachers a hard time, and this was in the time when you could still get a box in the side of your head for acting the bollocks.
View from the ferry entering Helsingør
I realised the other day that my Shakespeare wasn’t up to scratch probably due to my lack of paying attention in class 20+ years ago. I recall having passed a ferry called “Hamlet” in the Sound between Sweden in Denmark registered in Helsingør about a year ago and I thought “strange name for a ferry in Demark” at the time. There was certainly something rotten in the state of my knowledge, I only realised on a trip to the cultural haven of Legoland when reading on a Lego model that Helsingør is “Elsinore” in English, the setting for probably Bill’s most famous play of all namely Hamlet.
The penny finally dropped, it took a while but.
A container crane crashing down onto the deck of a containership at Southampton dock the other day, I don’t know exactly which day but the pilot on the way out from Southampton told me it was on Youtube so here it is. Amazingly the driver of the crane survived, apparently he wasn’t in the cab at the time, which is where they spend 99% of their time, so he was lucky. The crash has caused a logistical headache for the port ships are being diverted and it will take weeks to repair. Reasons for the accident, unknown at this time…….
Source: Security camera (via youtube) footage as far as I know.
We were leaving port the other day, or evening as the small video clips will show when we had a visit from a very loud and bright flying object, they started flashing searchlights across the deck and it was all very noisy. I went to the port bridge window and there was a big Helicopter of type unidentifiable about 10 metres from me the co-pilot had a number board with “69″ on it and he was gesticulating vigorously with a flashlight at the number, the penny finally dropped inside my head and I lifted the VHF tuned to channel 69 (nothing to do with any other purported uses of this cipher combination), as I tuned in an extremely efficient British voice crackled across the airwaves, “Coastguard helicopter Whiskey Delta, on exercise, permission to place a man on deck, OVER” I gave the OK “Whiskey Delta, permission granted” thinking to myself these are the boys that could make the difference on a dark and dirty night in the North Sea, so practice away lads.
My cameraman missed the first part of the operation we were all fairly awestruck at the proximity, noise and presence of such a big machine flying a few feet overhead. There are four small sequences showing the winchman exercise with a stretcher basket and finally fly off into the murk.
The last clip is a few seconds of the Dunkirk pilot making his entrance, there was too much wind for a launch so he had to arrive by chopper. I took a photo as they flew past the bridge and blogged previously under Flying Pilots
Last year when leaving the Elbe during Beaufort Force 6 to 7 wind conditions several of the type of tanker “Volgoneft” and other similar cargo ships were at anchor in a row, I asked the pilot about it he said that they have not got the power in their engines for this kind of weather. They didn’t have the stability either, so they had to wait it out for better weather. The ships in the Black Sea the other day had no chance. God rest the poor unfortunate sailors who died, and God help the families left behind.
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