21 March 2011; AT Sea, 3rd Day.

Today was our third day of the crossing and we reached the middle of this crossing. That is of course not the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean as such, as the Cape Verdes are an archipelago that is located quite a distance from the African Continent. However we covered half of our distance to Mindalo. Due to the bulge of Brazil with the Caribbean islands as a logical extension on the top, the Atlantic Ocean is smaller here than further North or further south. But our “middle of the crossing” did coincide with passing over the Mid Atlantic Ridge. This is a mountain range under water that pushes up quite high from the ocean floor. The day before the water depth was in the area of 20,000 feet, now it became as shallow as 6,000 feet. Still deep; but a lot less than before and at 08:00 we were right on top of it.

Volcanic activity at the mid atlantic ridge.

Here on the Mid Atlantic ridge is where the North American shelf is being born, by material being pushed out of the inner parts of the earth. Slowly but steadily that shelf is being pushed westwards and finally ends in the area of the San Andreas fault in California, where it hits another shelf. There is a lot of volcanic activity in the crack in the earth’s crust that forms the ridge but does not really affect us. However it is not unthinkable that if the situation shifted a little bit that a volcano could be formed that eventually would reach the ocean surface and create a new island. In the same way that millions of years ago the Cape Verde’s, the Canary’s and the Azores were formed. Even if that would happen it would still take a while before such a volcano would have spewed out enough material for it to reach the surface of the sea, certainly more than a human life time.

Yesterday I mentioned that one of the staff officers was the S.E.H. or Safety Environmental and Health Officer. This function has been a logical evolution from the original Environmental Officer or EO. The E.O function had been created in the mid 90’s when the environmental laws in Alaska became so complicated that it was hard for the officers on the ships to comply without have constant guidance about how to comply. Thus Carnival Corporation created for all its subsidiaries this new position. To give the function enough weight and for everybody to realize its importance, it became a staff officers function with direct reporting to the captain. In the last few years, the environmental part has settled down a bit, with all the legislation being in place and sufficient routines developed so that there was room within this function to spend time on other things.

 Those other things were Health and Safety. Now here, we have again the same situation as with environmental in the 90’s, there is a lot of new legislation coming our way. All the new rules are incorporated in the Marine Regulations of the company. That is done by the compliance department in Seattle. Then they have to be implemented onboard. Now the S.E.H. officer has the job to ensure that the regulations are implemented and remain implemented, as with so much to comply with, it is quite easy to forget something. Also it is his/her job to train the crew’s awareness in these new regulations, which in a way are a way of living. Finally the S.E.H officer has to develop routines to make the implementation of the rules as easy as possible for the sort of ship he/she serves on. When you then develop these routines, you come across anomalies and those have to be reported back to the office, so that the regulations can be improved and made more workable. For a ship such as the Prinsendam which is unique in the fleet, it is sometimes not so easy to do.  We are smaller and we do worldwide cruises and that means that we deal with the laws and insights of many different countries.  All in all it means that this is quite a busy job.

Today we had very good weather again. The weather forecast was showing what I was hoping for. A new weather front (with 30 feet waves) was bending sharply towards Greenland and thus did not push the old frontal system, under which we are currently living, further south. That meant that the swell had time to run out its energy to the North East of us before the ship was reaching this area. The result is that we can expect the swells to subside to 6 or 7 feet and that is as good as you can expect from the North Atlantic. The remainder of our crossing should be a very smooth trip.