09 May 2008, Vancouver.

We had a bit of consternation on arrival. The sudden appearance of the Golden Princess in the schedule did not much good for our preplanning. During the first call the plans had been made up for the season, with where to dock and how to have the optimum guest flow through the terminal and now suddenly we had to shift docks. For the whole season the Veendam was supposed to dock at Canada Place West and the Norwegian Sun at Canada Place East, leaving the north berth empty. Now the golden Princess, which is one of the shopping trolley class, was assigned the East berth for one call and the Norwegian Sun moved to the West berth. Thus the Veendam ended up at the North berth.

It does not look much of a change but while you dock starboard alongside at the West berth for an optimum traffic flow, it is portside alongside at the North berth. That means that on board the luggage preparation, the off loading of recyclables and the planned loading of provisions has to be turned around 180o. Not a big problem but it needs some reorganizing. It took our Bo ‘sun most of the day to get it all lined up as he is with the sailors in charge of aligning the luggage bins in the Marshalling area, so that the off loading takes place in the proper sequence.

Today was a beautiful day which hopefully lifted everybody’s spirit a bit as the terminal was a place of stress for a lot of people. In total 6,300 guests had to go off the ships and back on again. That meant long lines for cabs for going home and even longer lines for guests waiting to go through American passport control before boarding. As the Alaskan ports do not have the facilities to process larger number of persons entering the country, the American entry requirements by Customs and Border Protection are done in Canada in the cruise terminal. Not a perfect way to start a cruise, standing in line but at least it does not take any time away from going ashore in the first Alaskan port.

I was in a hurry again as the Seymour Narrows tide was early. In the coming weeks it will be later but this time I would be able to just make it if I was able to pull out early. We did pull away from the dock early but not as early as I had hoped for as at the last moment two vans with luggage arrived. So instead of gaining an hour I only gained 30 minutes and I could only hope that it was sufficient. Also the fact that I was now docked portside alongside, did not help, as it meant loosing another 15 minutes by having to back away from the dock and having to turn in the harbor. However by 1700 we sailed under the Lions Gate Bridge, going full out with hopes in our hearts.

Schedule wise we did make it because traffic started to interfere. We are of course not the only ship that goes for slack tide. There are also tugboats with barges heading North and similar traffic coming South. The big problem this time was a log tow that went through at exact slack tide and was taking a long long time. So we had to slow down and that meant by the time we would be in Seymour Narrows the current would have picked up to over 5 knots and that is a no no. The chance to be caught by such a current, that was also rapidly building up to 8 knots, is too great a risk going through. The Passage is not that wide and we go through with a maneuvering speed of about 12 knots. 5 knots of current gives then a side ways set of nearly 40% when making the turn and that is too close for comfort. So we had to abort and wait for 3 hours before the current had reduced its self again sufficiently to go through. That means that tomorrow morning I will have to go full out with the Veendam to catch up. A little comfort was that next to our ship, two tug-and-tows were in the same predicament and their skippers vented their flustration loudly over the VHF. With their slow speed they had hoped to sail North on a following tide and now it was going be the other way around.