01 April 2018: Fort Lauderdale, USA.

Today we started a repeat of the cruise from 14 days ago, going Fort Lauderdale – Amber Cove – San Juan – Philipsburg / St.Maarten – Half Moon Cay – Fort Lauderdale.  We are sailing with a full house, including many families as this is the Easter Holiday Cruise. We had Easter chocolate eggs this morning during Lido Breakfast and the Easter Bunny had deposited them at the Salad corner, because as we all know, Chocolate Easter Eggs are calorie free otherwise nobody would eat them.  Happy Easter from the ms Eurodam.

I will not make the full voyage as I have to catch my next ship, the ms Rotterdam, and will therefore fly from St. Maarten to Tampa as the Rotterdam is also a Sunday ship. Trying to make it from ship to ship in one day is too tight when taking into consideration disembarkation, waiting at the airport and possible flight delays. You can drive it in about 4 hrs. but with picking up a car and dropping it off, it is still very tight.

So I will leave the ship earlier as there would be nothing for me to do on the Eurodam after this cruise anyway as the ship will go to wet dock. The ship’s crew is already very busy with planning for that.

The ship will go to Freeport for a 10 day wet dock and after that it will commence the spring Trans canal cruise heading for Alaska. She will then be a Seattle based ship sailing 7 days to Alaska.  A wet dock is a maintenance docking of a ship whereby it is not lifted out of the water……….. , it is not going dry as it is not going into a dry-dock.  In the old days the ships went into dry dock once a year but with better underwater paint and better seals on the propeller shafts or Azipods that is no longer a requirement. Now the ships are going dry every 2.5 years but even this can be extended if Lloyds Register (on behalf of Flag State and the Insurance companies) agrees. This happens sometimes if the cruise schedule of the ship cannot be brought into synch with the regular dry dock schedule and then everything is a little bit extended.

Grand Bahama Shipyard is a big operation and does not only cater for the cruise ships of Carnival Corp.  Here we see from top to bottom, a Crane ship for oil rigs, a super tanker, our ms Maasdam, a small Feeder containership, a regular cargo ship (I think for emergency repairs as the deck cargo is still there), a product tanker and an Apartment of the Seas. (Belonging to RCI, so we also make money from the competition) (Photo Courtesy: I think this photo came via Cruisedailynews)

Grand Bahama Shipyard in Freeport is partly owned by Fincantieri, partly by the Bahama Government and partly owned by Carnival Corp in Miami and thus it makes sense to go there. If you have to pay for a wet or dry dock you might as well pay it to yourself. As all our ships have been built by Fincantieri (except the ms Prinsendam) it is quite handy to have them involved when specialized expertise is needed or Italian spare parts, which otherwise might be hard to get. With Freeport in close proximity to Florida, most of the ships falling under the Carnival Corp. umbrella that are sailing from Florida and scheduled for a dry dock can go there before disappearing to other parts of the world.

A lot of maintenance for a cruise ship can be done while remaining afloat and docked alongside a shipyard pier. It is certainly a lot easier for those on board as there will be no switching over to shore power, no loss of water supplies, steady air-conditioning, etc. etc. The ship has 10 days to accomplish a lot and today we had already service engineers joining us to seize up the scope of the work and to make the initial preparations. Our marshalling area, there where we load the ships supplies, is already starting to fill up with toolboxes, crates, cartons and other pre delivered spare parts. On arrival Fort Lauderdale on the 8^th of April a lot more will come on board as we have learned through the years that it is a lot easier to carry the materials on board with us than to start hunting for them in the ship yard.

Captain John Scott.

We also had a change of captain today; Captain Eric Barhorst went on vacation and he was replaced by Captain John Scott who has been on this ship already for quite some time.

Captain Scott is one of the English captains who joined Holland America in the mid 90’s when we had a shortage of Master Licenses in the fleet while we were expanding.

He was the first captain of the ms Noordam IV but transferred not too long ago when we had another round of musical chairs. I have a brief bio on the blog site but I hope to expand that in the future.

The good ship Eurodam pulled out nicely on time as all the guests made it safely on board without a delay. As the weather looks good, we will be sailing north of the Bahama Bank (Through the North West Providence Channel) and then come down to the south by passing the Turks and Caicos Islands why aiming for Amber Cove on the North side of the Dominican Republic.