23 Feb. 2017; At sea.

Today we are sailing back towards Florida and are on our way to Half Moon Cay our own private island. We are taking the outside route again, aiming for the North side of the Bahamian Islands. Then at the last minute we will dive inside and sail along Cat Island towards Half Moon Cay. That is not really the islands name; it is officially Little San Salvador, as it is a smaller version of San Salvador Island which lays more to the North East. San Salvador Island is supposedly the island were Columbus discovered the new world. I say supposedly as there are several other islands which lay the same claim to the same fame.  And nobody really knows the truth. Columbus did land somewhere in the area in 1492 and did discover the new world although he thought he was in India. He only later found out that he was not there but had stumbled into a new piece of Real Estate and nobody really understood what it was.

That honor came to a gentleman called Amerigo Vespucci, he figured out that this newly discovered land was not part of the Far East but something separate and as a result the Americas are now named after him and not after Columbus.  Maybe not fair but then the Vikings were there way before Columbus and maybe it should have been called Erickson land. On the west side the Chinese came to the Vancouver area before 1492 and thus the land should have been named after the Chinese admiral who led the (large fleet) that got there. But as is the case most of the time, the guy who is the best in public relations gets most of the credit. As Amerigo was also a cartographer he could put any name on new land and thus put his own onto it.

The chance we still find new land, even if it is only a reef, is very remote as with satellite cameras and with google world Omni present, each piece of land has been well photographed. There are still new names given to certain features; it is a tradition to give long serving Environmentalists and scientists who work in Antarctica the name of a glacier. There are still plenty out there without a name so no scientist has to despair for the time being. Although the question is, with the current warming up of the earth, if there will be enough left in the future to continue this tradition.

For sailors the only real option left to have something named after him or her is to find a reef or something similar. That can be done by running onto it (not appreciated by the boat owner normally) or to try and get it officially approved by the Cartography industry such as the NOAA.  I have been told, anecdotally, that the rock which Capt. Schettino found while sailing passed Isla Giglio is now named by the locals after him. Probably the result of so many tourists asking the locals were it exactly is and how to get there to take a selfie. I do not think that I would want to get immortalized that way.

As it is now so long ago I can tell a little story: I tried it myself a long time ago. Not to run aground but to get my name on the chart. In 1986 when I was 3^rd officer on the ss Rotterdam, I saw in the chart a rock which was called the Api Rock, in an area called Red Wood Bay north of Cape Decision. My nick name in those days, a Dutch short cut for Albert was Appie, so here was my chance. I submitted to the NOAA a request for a spelling correction Api to Appi and waited to see what would happen. A friend of mine in the USCG kept an eye on its progress as he thought it was quite funny. Well it made it through the first review and I kept my fingers crossed. Then there was somewhere a cleaver clog who checked it out and it did not make it to the approval for the next chart issue. As a matter of fact, the name Api Rock disappeared for a time completely from the chart.  I do not know who or what Api was but that was not the idea either.

Tomorrow the captain is not going to try to get a reef named after him, as a matter of fact we are not going to anchor at all but stay on the engines to avoid that chance. We were supposed to have Easterly winds which would have kept the ship behind the anchor; but we have a new cold front coming through from the North West and that means if we would anchor, the ship would drift onto the beach. By staying on the engines we can make a good lee for the shore tenders and stay nicely in deep water. The first tenders will come alongside and start ferrying the guests ashore by 08.00 hrs.  So the weather is going to be a mixed bag; windy but later subsiding, dry with a chance of a shower during the day.