10 January 2010; Dry –dock, Freeport Bahamas.

We are now in day 6 of our dry – dock and the count down has started. By late Tuesday afternoon or evening we should be leaving the dry dock and start a major clean up of the ship. Then we will have an evening and a night to finish off all the projects before we arrive in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday morning. We still have an “Ocean Liner Row” here in Freeport. The Explorer of the Seas sits in dry dock and the Fascination is next door in the water. This ship is going through a similar sort of SOE as all the HAL ships have been doing. There are two other cruise ships in port but they are laid up. To the right of us is the Island Adventure which sailed for a long time from Fort Lauderdale on gambling cruises. It was built as a Russian ferry/cruise ship long ago but its future now seems to be very bleak. To the left of us is the Casino Royale which is also a gambling ship that lastly sailed as the Jewel of St Petersburg off the Tampa Coast. So five cruise ships in the dry dock area and then there are the regular calls of other ships to the Freeport Cruise terminal. I see a mega liner about every other day docking there. The rest of the port traffic is mainly consists of MSC container ships that come in and leave like clockwork every day.

The rain stopped during the night and the temperature started to drop according to the predictions of the Weather Forecast and that made everybody, who is working outside, very happy. The new section is now completely welded to the ship and they are installing the last side pieces, the balcony dividers and cutting out the balcony doors. These holes have to be made at the last moment, as during the lift of the section onto the ship, maximum strength is needed to avoid the metal housing from twisting while it hangs in the cranes. A start is being made with connecting service pipes (potable water, grey water, black water, AC ducts etc.) this all should be in place before we start our cruise on Wednesday. The cabin paneling will be installed during the first part of the cruise and for that purpose a number of carpenters will sail with us. How many will depend how far we get with the completion of the section while we are still here.

Stage 1, only the contours of the balcony doors are outlined on the steel.

Stage 2, the size of the door/window has been cut out and is ready to be removed. Tomorrow the door/window frames will be installed.

Because we are doing things with the aft ship anyway, it also gave us the opportunity to remodel the Ocean Spa. The fitness section is being enlarged by making the wellness restroom smaller as that area was seldom used by the guests. Starboard aft treatment room, known to us as Cleopatra’s bath tub is being removed and replaced by an outside handicapped toilet. Inside, the Rasul (a sort of Turkish bath) that nobody used is being replaced by a treatment room. As we kept the TV’s on the treadmills going, this is a rather popular area for the contractors to work. However I had to spoil their enjoyment a little bit, as I turned down their request for showing more Risqué movies on the screens.

Thus far I had not mentioned our engine department at all, while they do take a rather large share of the dry dock work for their account. Many pieces of technical equipment can only be serviced during dry dock and the engine room is full of people doing very technical things that I can only vaguely comprehend. I can recognize a butterfly valve but when there is talk about spool pipes, ball valves and flanges I nod my head wisely and let the engineers get on with it. During this dry dock both the regular Prinsendam Chief Engineers are onboard and so are both the chief Electricians. A major issue with the engine room is always to get the new parts down there. It is all compartmentalized with watertight doors and Fire screen doors and their openings are often too small for a special piece of equipment. Also you do not want to cut a hole in the hull (see our laundry machine) each time you want to replace something, it means that rather inventive ways have to be found. This time the challenge was a new boiler bottom, or as we call it the frying pan. Too big to go through a watertight door, the only solution was to remove a complete staircase with fire screen door attached and lower the pan this way into the upper engine room.

One of the things that can only be done in dry dock is cleaning the seawater inlet for the cooling water of the engines. If you would do that at sea then your the choice is between a black out or flooding the engine room. In dock the sea water inlet chests and piping are inspected and cleaned.

After cleanup and ready to be closed again.

As the seawater inlet chests are all open and the ship is out of the water, cooling water for an auxiliary engine (that provides the electricity for the whole ship) has to be piped in. Same for potable water coming in and grey and black water going out. For this there are fixed connections in the portside provision break and the engineers hook these connections up when dry dock starts and disconnect again when drydock is finished. During these procedures the ship goes into black out, as the auxiliary engine has to be stopped while switching from cooking water through the sea chest to the hose supply and back.

The large rubber hose in the foreground supplies the cooling water.

Another item that can only be worked on in drydock are the bow thrusters. I need them everyday for docking so they suffer a lot of wear and tear, thus each drydock they are thorougly inspected and overhauled. The electro motor is lifted up and the propellor itself removed for inspection and cleaning.

The aft bow thruster electro motor being lifted from its foundation.

The bow thruster blades are cleaned and re-installed again.

Note: I received a question to explain what a Suez light is (see previous blog where I lost my mast). A Suez light is a red light located at the centre stern of the ship that helps the ship behind you (when going through the canal) to follow in convoy. In the same way we have some other unusual lights such as a Panama Canal steering light (so the pilot can follow the bow movement in the dark) and a flashing light on the the radarmast when sailing in Japanese waters.