The weather on the North Pacific side is holding nicely. Hardly any wind and that helps to keep the waves down as there is no energy to sustain them. This weather is to last at least for another two days and that means a very nice call in San Diego. So I am expecting nearly wind still weather with the temperatures coming up to the mid 60’s, which is more than we have at the moment. Although there is very little wind, the 5 to 6 knots that are blowing are coming from the North West, and bring a cool flow to the area. Sailing on top of the cooler California current does not do much either for keeping balmy weather and thus noon time high was 57oF / 14oC. A nice “warming up” for the coming Alaska season. We are the 3rd ship to arrive there, with the Volendam on May 1st, the Oosterdam on May 4rd and the Statendam on May 5 in Vancouver. This will mean that in Alaska it will still be quite nippy with lots of snow left in Glacier Bay.
But before we get there, we still have to go one more time to and from Fort Lauderdale on a regular trans canal cruise, with the exception that San Diego will not be a embarkation port next call, but a “cruise stop” and we even stay until late in the evening. With downtown located right across from the Pier, it should be a nice evening out for all on board. That return cruise is different as well, due to the fact that we have to get in the Alaskan rotation schedule, so we have more than 14 days and that gives us the chance to stay longer in port and to change the ports a little bit. Thus we will be making our semi-annual call to Corinto –Nicaragua and we also have Manzanillo on the schedule. For a while hardly any cruise ships were going there but now the port is deemed safe again and thus the cruise ships are reappearing. Hopefully in a few months more Mexican ports will be available again as well. I still hope that one day we can return to Acapulco, even if it was only for the scenic sailing in and out.
However at the moment we are still on our way to San Diego and everybody on the bridge is fully focused on whales. They are moving up the coast at the moment and thus we can expect to encounter them. The challenge is to avoid “close encounters”. We did not see many of them, with one exception of a whale who suddenly breached about 500 yards off and was then never seen again. For the remainder of the day it was quiet. No doubt that will change by the time we are approaching Glacier Bay. This is one of the more difficult sides of watch keeping. As a deck officer you are forever preparing for the worst in order to prevent it from happening. That goes as well for all the safety trainings that are being done and that also goes for watch keeping. Thus it is hard to quantify how successful you are when on watch. When at the end of the watch nothing has happened and all is still safe, you have to assume that you have done a good job. It would drive a statistician nuts, no data to report, so his/her logic would be, nothing is happening so you do not need a navigator.
It is one of the discussions we always have with our friends the engineers. As they are always repairing and overhauling things, they have something to show for at the end of their watch. When they come to the bridge, they only see the navigator looking out of the window and nothing is happening. In the past that would give rise to acrimonious exchanges about who is more useful to the ship. Nowadays most officers carry dual qualifications so they are aware of what goes on upstairs and downstairs and that has increased the mutual respect enormously. In some cargo company’s the functions have merged into the one of “maritime officer” where an officer works both upstairs and downstairs. On cruise ships that does not work, as both disciplines are too comprehensive and divergent to be merged into one function.
Today was thus a nice quiet day on the bridge. That will change tomorrow, when we have the “controlled mayhem” of a change over port. I will be at the pilot station at 05.00 for a 06.00 docking and the ships agent is going to try to get CBP on board as quickly as possible to start clearing everybody. Hopefully it will all work out.
March 31, 2013 at 9:26 am
Statisticians….. what has to be remembered is that 78% of people who quote statistics just make them up.
On M/V Arcadia (Zuiderdam’s first non-HAL sister) in December I was told by one of the bridge officer that earlier that day we had had a close call with a whale. It briefly surfaced directly ahead of us, but the OOW didn’t know which way it was going so the OOW decided to wait until the spout was spotted again. Good call – if we’d altered course to port we would have hit it. But now we were close…. so we turned to starboard, counted to ten, then turned to port so that the stern didn’t do a “Costa Concordia” on it. Our closest point of approach was estimated to be 50 metres.
Later on another passenger asked one of the watch officers why they didn’t put out an announcement once the whale had been spotted. The bridge officer said “actually, we were a little bit busy at the time…”