16 Oct. 2014: At Sea.

Well dry dock work was completed today so the good ship Veendam left the dock and sailed down the Delaware River back to sea. Yesterday I blogged about the Holland America cargo ships calling at Philadelphia on a regular basis but I did not mention the passenger ships. Well there weren’t any.  In the days that HAL ran the Trans-Atlantic service, calling at Philadelphia meant a longer sailing time on the ocean and then another 80 miles on the river with slow speed. Landing passengers in NY was thus faster and with the rail road connections, the number of people going in the direction of Philadelphia could easily be accommodated by train.  Thus it remained a cargo only port.  It might be possible that the passenger ships have called there in the past occasionally but I have not found any dates yet.

The reason I know the dates mentioned yesterday is that I am busy with trying to record every voyage, each HAL ship has ever made. Starting in 1872 until the present day.  I am now up to just over 8000 entries and more or less complete until 1922. That means that I have another 90 years to go.  The information about all the voyages can be found in the HAL archives in Rotterdam. Most offices, both in Rotterdam and New York, kept what they called Movement Books in which they noted the ports of call during each voyage, the number of passengers on board, the value of the cargo and the use of coal and or fuel oil. That way I also find the names of the captains as it is one of the ways that they are recorded.  The challenge is, and it is a real challenge, is that the archives are not complete.  The company was not always focused on keeping material for their historical records and then there was the great flood of 1953. The archives at that time were stored in the basement which is not a good place in a country that can flood easily. During the Feb storm of 1953 the water was pushed so high up the Nieuwe Waterweg to Rotterdam that it came above the dock edge and washed into the cellars of the Head Office. A lot of material was lost.

It means for me and other historians it is a puzzle to find out details of the company’s past.  Fascinating but time consuming. Thus during each vacation period, I spend at least a day in the archives and photograph the books that survived. Then, when at sea, I spend one hour each day transcribing the voyage dates from the books. It is a slow process but eventually everybody will be able to see the complete records on the blog site. Both of the captains and the voyages of each ship.

Western shore with the Philadelphia airport in the distance

With slow speed going down the river means that it takes approx. 6 hours from sea buoy to the dock and vice versa. The Delaware River is, at least at this stretch not very scenic and we mainly sail past industrial complexes. The river remains fairly wide until past Philadelphia upstream and anything that might be scenic is not so easy to see.

It is wide but not deep. The central fairway has to be dredged regularly to keep it open to deep drafted ships. Necessary as deep laden tankers travel all the way up to Philadelphia.

Same view but now on the Radar. The airport are the two beams near the top. Light blue indicates shallow water, black the dredged fairway.

What was of interest were two things.  One, just past Wilmington, they are building / creating / constructing a mountain and when just passed by that location, there is a bridge, high enough to let a  ship of the Veendam size pass under.

Delaware Memorial Bridges

The mountain is of course the local garbage dump and what was special about this one was that it was nicely covered over. While we saw the garbage trucks rolling in and out, behind them rolled trucks with soil covering the slopes of the mountain straight away. I did not see a recycling plant there for separation but maybe that is at another location.

Up and down the river, the pilots conn the ships by keeping it in the ranges. Using green leading lights that are kept in line – Green above Green –

And the same bridges but now in the chart

When in perfect alignment the ship is exactly in the middle of the fairway. A ship that comes the other way is doing the same thing and then the pilots talk to each other to make passing arrangements. Most of the traffic on the river is with barges and the tugboat skippers that push or pull the barges are tuned into this as well.

As these barges can come from all over the States a rich variation in accents can be heard over the VHF; and sometimes you wonder if they can all understand each other.  Some accents can be quite heavy and those from Alabama do talk slightly different than those from New Jersey.

We will now head for Boston for a timely arrival so we can get back into the cruise schedule. Our next cruise is the Panama Canal, ending in San Diego, and I will be on board as dry-dock also curtailed my activities.  The weather at the moment is not that great out there so we will have a bit of a wobbly ride.