19 August 2010; St Petersburg 2nd day.

A standard item during this two day stay is that all the cruise ships are bunkering fuel. Russia is among the cheaper suppliers of HFO and MGO (Heavy fuel Oil and Marine Gas Oil) and thus everybody stocks up. The difference per ton, might only be $ 10 but on loading 1400 tons it is $ 14,000 and if you make several calls it soon mounts up. My challenge is always to have the agent find out the exact time the bunker barge will arrive at the ship, so we can start without delay. A second uncertainty is the pump capacity of the barge that is chartered by the supplier. This varies from call to call. We now have bunker days where not more then 80 tons an hour was pumped, but also the occasional highlight of a barge with 150 tons pump capacity. With a low pump volume it can take all night before the full load is in the tanks. Something I forever try to prevent as it can inconvenience the guests sleeping near the barge and so I hope to get the fuelling started at 8 am and then (hopefully) get finished by sunset. My efforts are normally in vain and the barge pops up whenever it wants. This time we were in luck. The barge arrived at noon time, had a reasonable pump capacity and was gone by midnight. Quick work for Russian standards.

Had yesterday been an overcast day today was one big sunny day. There was a strong chilly wind blowing from the East but the guests in town were not hampered by this as in between the houses you only felt the sun. I kept a close eye on this wind in the mean time to ensure that it did not veer to the other side of the ship. It was on the portside of the ship and would help on departure by pushing the ship off the dock. Would it veer to the other side then it would pin the Prinsendam against the dock. With a wind force six, it would mean that I would need two tugboats to leave the port. Here it had help in the form of the stern flag of the Costa Magica docked in front of us. The very big Italian flag was merrily flapping in the wind, and sometimes even straining itself in the blustery wind. So the bridge watch was tasked with keeping an eye on the flag and if it changed direction to call me at once, but the wind stayed where it was.

Thus departure arrived and with it the pilot who was deposited on the ship by a small pilot boat with the very Russian name of Boomerang. Then he was very happy to announce that Siberia (bottom of the Russian Football league) had just beaten the Dutch soccer club PSV from Eindhoven with 0-1 and after that we could focus on getting blown off the dock. For most of the outbound voyage we would have this strong wind full on the starboard beam and thus I tried to make the pilot understand the peculiarities of the Prinsendam with its wind catching balconies and its large funnel. It took him until the first course change before he fully understood what I exactly meant. So by implementing the “blow-away maneuver” I moved the ship off the dock and then lined her up high into the wind to ensure that while we were gathering speed we would not drift too much away from the ideal course line.

Once we were in the main channel we could speed up and the faster you go the less drift there is. We passed by Kronstadt of course and their our travel guru Frank was enthralling his audience with anecdotes and facts from the Russian past. He came up with a new one that I had not heard before. Namely how the Dutch flag came into being. Well Tzar Peter the Great, simply took the 17th century Dutch Merchant Flag (since those days also our national flag) and moved the red band to the bottom. So from Dutch Red White and Blue, to Russian White Blue and Red. Also the Union Jack and the Scottish flag were given a similar sort of treatment by reversing the colors and they were also used in the Russian Fleet.

Tomorrow we are in Helsinki and it is supposed to be a sunny day. We are docked in the down town area, so things could not be better.