Day 43 - Interesting Cargo

The four days in Belgium were very interesting. This is the first port we’ve been in that actually runs a bus into the port. It’s made getting around very simple. And since the last bus stop was only a short walk back to the ship it made shopping easy as well. With a very few exceptions we’ve stuck to our ‘only consumable’ purchases rule. The inter-city trains were easy to use as well. It seemed like we just went from one to the other with almost no waiting time. (Germany was the same as well.)

The picture I took here is part of the reason choosing this ship was a good choice. The cargo has been a mix of steel pipes, boxed components too large to go into a container, bags (not sure what was in them), and odd pieces of machinery (as pictured here). This often requires more time to load, precise placement, and sometimes rebalancing of the load. These things are what give us our extra time in port. I asked the Supercargo what this piece of equipment is. It turns out that it's the base of a 3000tn crane that will be used building offshore pipelines.

We spent the first part of the transit up on the bridge tonight. This transit required a pilot to take us into a set of locks, another for the river and a third to take us to open sea. We should be a day and a half at sea before the next pilot comes aboard for Aviles, Spain.