15 January 2010, sailing North of Cuba.

We sailed through the Nicolas channel into the Old Bahama channel above Cuba with strong head winds and swells. The wind speed measured about 25 knots from the East and with the ship going against it at full speed it was very windy on the forward part of the ship. Normally we have 1 to 1.5 knots of current against us but this time we did not notice anything. I do not know what is exactly going on but also the Gulfstream was much weaker and colder than normal and this might have affected the North Westerly current in the Old Bahama channel as well. Tomorrow when we enter the Caribbean Sea we will find out what the Equatorial current is doing there, which runs from East to North West under the coast of Cuba and also feeds the Gulfstream. The weather in the Central part of the Caribbean Sea is at the moment very windy but that is supposed to start to subside by the time we get there.

The wind is affecting me in yet another way and that is that I could not compensate and check the ships magnetic compass. I have a compass compensator on board; a retired United States Navy Captain and the idea was to do a swing around at the Key West sea buoy to see if the magnetic compass had been affected by the new steel section that we have put on the stern. The steel hull of the ship affects a proper read out of the compass but by placing little magnets under the binnacle you can neutralize (e.g. compensate for) the ships influence on the magnetic compass. However it was so cold and windy at the sea buoy that I decided to postpone until tomorrow, hoping for warmer and better weather in the Caribbean Sea. Compensating the compass entails a complete spin around of the ship to ensure that the ships steel is neutralized on all headings. The whole procedure takes about two hours.

The ships magnetic compass without its protective canvas cover.

A magnetic compass compensator is not an official function and everybody can in principle do it. All navigators learn the principles at the Maritime Academy, so I could do it myself. However the more often you do it, the more routine you get in recognizing patterns and the faster and the better the result is. Thus I obtained the services of this gentleman from Florida who has made a sort of second career out of it. He gets hired because the captains recognize that he knows what he is doing and as a result he has done several Holland America cruise ships in the past. If the weather is still not good enough tomorrow, I can always do it before arrival in Santa Marta which has a sheltered anchorage.

In the mean time it turns out that we had our dry dock at the right time. Due to the earthquake in Haiti, containers for that country have been stacking up in Freeport and are congesting the port. As a result it is getting very difficult to get any container out and that could have befallen us, if we had been there a week later. All our materials were shipped in by container and quite a few came through Freeport Container terminal as we could only load so many in Fort Lauderdale ourselves. I wonder how the Fascination is doing, she is there for a Carnival SOE upgrade. No doubt they will also have materials coming in that way. Maybe they were lucky and had everything in, before the issue started.

By 8 pm we turned the corner at Cabo Maisi, the most Eastern point of Cuba and entered the Windward passage. Tomorrow by 2 am we will have cleared the south point of Haiti and will enter the Caribbean Sea.