25 September 2014; St. Lawrence Seaway.

To maintain the schedule the ship has to maintain about 16 knots of speed for a timely arrival in Quebec. That is without taking current and wind into consideration. The current could even itself out as it changes every 6 hours. It does not really work that way as the strength of the current varies depending where you are on the river. If you are lucky you are in an area of the river where you will benefit from the full flood behind you and hopefully you are a little bit out of the center of the current when the ebb is coming down the river.  Today the big spoiler for not needing extra speed and thus saving fuel was the wind. It decided to blow from the WNW and that is more or less in line with the direction of the estuary of the St. Lawrence.  Blowing a steady 35 knots did not help for making good speed either and thus the ship had to make over 18 knots to keep schedule. A secondary occurrence was that the wind was blowing at certain times against the Flood current. This created a sort of very sharp sort of swell which can make the ship behave quite unpleasantly. Plus if you are at nearly full speed to compensate for the adverse wind and swell, the ship can start to pitch and you get a rather abrupt an unpleasant movement. It feels as if the ship gets slapped on the nose every minute or so.

To avoid this, the captain approached the top of the estuary under an angle so the waves were causing more of a roll than a pitch. And rolling we can deal with by means of stabilizers. The St. Lawrence then goes for a short while almost straight in a direction of North to East and then it bends to the south, which is basically the end of the estuary and where the regular river begins.

This whole estuary river area is considered open waters and no pilotage is required here. The river has a Vessel Traffic Separation System a sort highway at sea that keeps the inbound and outbound flow of ships separated and for the rest it is still so wide that there is plenty of room to avoid each other. It will take from departure Charlottetown yesterday at 17.00 hrs. until 22.00 tonight to travel so far up the St. Lawrence that one could really say; we are on a river now. The lights of various villages became visible on both sides and buoys started to appear indicating the sailing route.

The map shows the whole St. Lawrence pilotage system. Due to the length of the river is has been sub-divided in several sections.

When going to Quebec, you need two sets of pilots. One from the beginning of the –real – river and one for the final part of the approach about 5 miles below the berth; where the ship enters a different pilotage area. That pilotage area lasts until Trois Rivieres, a village approx. 2/3 of the way to Montreal. Here another set of pilots join to bring the ship all the way to Montreal. If you go from the mouth of the river directly to Montreal you get three times a River – pilot change in a straight row. The Veendam is not going further than Quebec and thus there are only two changes.

For the stretch from Les Escomins to  the Quebec boundary two pilots will come on board as the total time to travel the distance goes over the 8 hours. You always want to have a restful pilot and alert pilot on the bridge and thus you will not hear us complaining about that. As the distance to the dock from pilot border line is only five miles, these 2 will be replaced by only one.  But if the ship would have continued directly up to Montreal, there would have been two again, due to the duration of the journey.

Our big challenge here is the fact that these pilots converse with each other and with traffic control which governs the river, in French and not the regular French that some of us can understand and speak but Quebecois French. This is considered a sort of original 17^th century French when the area was a colony but I cannot make head or tail of it. They of course give their orders to the helmsman in English, otherwise nothing would happen, but for the rest the navigators on the bridge depend on getting all the information they would like to be aware off on the pilots willingness to give a comprehensive translation after they had an completely incomprehensible conversation with somebody on the other side of the VHF.

We are expecting to dock around 07.00 at the Quebec cruise terminal and we should be joined by the Regatta of Oceana Cruises. The weather should be good. Sunny but windy for most of the day.