11 May, At sea

It is not often that the seas are completely flat but that was what we had today, sailing South Eastwards along the Greek coast. The sky was hazy again with the now familiar brown tinge of Sahara sand in the air but with the sun shining it was a wonderful day at sea.

The biggest “island” of Greece is the Peloponnesus and we have to sail all the way around it to get to Piraeus. The Peloponnesus is an “artificial” island as it used to be a peninsula attached to the main land until they dug the Corinth canal, which effectively severed the peninsula from the main land. The Veendam is too wide for the canal hence we sail around the island. The same goes for many other ships and thus we see a lot of shipping on this route. All the traffic from the Middle East and the Black Sea that is heading for Western Europe follows this route.

In the late evening we came to a real bottle neck of traffic. The Steno Elafonisou. This is a 3 mile wide strait south of the Peloponnesus and North of Nissos Kithiron. You can also sail around Kithiron but that is five miles longer. Most ships in this area travel at speeds of 10 to 15 knots and going around would add at least half an hour to the voyage and no captain likes to do that. I always prefer to keep my options open. About an hour before entering the strait you can see on the radar quite well how much traffic there is and how it is developing. If it does not look good, then the decision can be made to take the slightly longer route. For a ship as the Veendam is only adds about 15 minutes to the voyage.

We have nowadays a very handy gadget to track ships. At least the bigger ships. It is called the AIS. The Automated Identification System. Each larger ship has a transponder onboard and that sends and receives information. That information is displayed on the radar screen as a little triangle. By clicking on the triangle the name of the other ship is displayed, its next port of call, the course and speed and it even gives anti collision information. It is a great help to get a quick overview of a traffic situation.

One has to be careful though, as its effectiveness depends entirely on the diligence of the navigator of the ship, in entering the correct data. This does not always happen and we have seen ships sailing towards Spain while the AIS indicates Turkey, ships arriving at a port three months ago and a whole host of other mistakes. As long as it is used as another aid to the navigation it is a great help but it is not something to rely on.

This time there was little traffic in the strait but instead we had to contend with a fog bank. What started out as a sandy haze developed in a full blown thick white wall of fog. People do not associate the Mediterranean with fog but after a warm wind still day with a cold current running along the shore, fog banks can develop in the late evening. Luckily it did not take too long, as it would have spoiled my nights sleep and I needed to be fresh for the mayhem that is called arrival Piraeus.