21 August 2009, At Sea.

The North Sea is one of the busiest shipping areas in the world. Dover Strait to the South, together with Malacca Strait near Singapore are two of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Bottle necks connecting major industrial area’s with the larger open oceans. To avoid collisions, near misses and or other havoc the North Sea has assigned shipping lanes for traffic to follow. A sort of highway on the open sea. These highways ensure that ships can follow the most economic and safe route and at the same time not stray into the areas with the oil platforms and the wind mill farms. The first oil platforms appeared in the North Sea in the 1960’s and the windmills are an increasing occurrence since the 1980’s. There are still several wind parks under construction at the moment and more are planned with the general reluctance of embracing nuclear energy both in the Netherlands and in Great Britain.

All this, together plus numerous fishermen thrown in for good measure, make sailing in the North Sea an interesting affair. Our route to the Thames estuary has two navigational “highlights”. The first one is Friesland Junction and the second one is the traffic schemes off the Thames estuary. Friesland Junction located just above the Frisian coast of the Netherlands is the most interesting one. Here traffic from Scandinavia, from Dover Strait, from the Hamburg area and from North East England all come together. It results in a sort of round-about with multiple exits. Great fun for the navigator to track all the ships and to weave safely through them all.

Luckily most traffic adheres nicely to the rules for sailing through these Vessel Traffic Separation Schemes and that makes it all a lot easier. What does need attention nowadays is traffic that might be hidden inside the Wind parks or between the oil platforms. These structures show up on the radar screen in the same way as a ship does. Same size blip or echo. Larger ships have an AIS echo (Automatic Identification System) but the smaller ships do not have it most of the time. So small ships can be hidden between the wind mills and go un-noticed until they suddenly come racing out un-expectedly. Thus we now have the new credo on the bridge, plot every echo that you see and if it moves it must be a ship.

As mentioned yesterday, we were lucky with the fact that the frontal system with the high winds came over while we were still in the sheltered waters of the Oslofjord and as a result we did not have too much swell to deal with when we came into open waters. The Prinsendam rides the waves very well and what could have been an unpleasant movement on another ship was just a gentle rocking here onboard. By mid day today there was just a bit of wind generated waves left and the sun was shining brightly. A very nice ending for the cruise, but we will have another day tomorrow in Tilbury.

Although we will not have the scenic cruise up river, the positive thing is that I am docking earlier and that gives the guests a whole extra afternoon to get to London, or Tilbury or Gravesend (opposite the river) if they want to do so. You can get by train very quickly to London from Tilbury as the train station is less then a mile from the dock. For those who find a mile too far to walk, we run a shuttle service as well.

Tomorrow I will pick up the pilot at 0800 hrs. and if things go well I should be outside by 1 pm. awaiting clearance by the authorities. The weather looks very good for tomorrow, sunny, with no wind and temperatures in the low seventies.