06 November 2011; At Sea.

 You will notice that I have uploaded a bit later than is normal for my daily addition to the blog. Normally I write this during breakfast but as I spent most of the night and day on the bridge today; I could only compose the yesterday’s blog during dinner time this time. Yesterday the 5th. was for me a sort of important day as well, although I had almost forgotten it. Same as I tend to do with my birthday, my wife tends to remind me. But yesterday I was 30 years with the company and I celebrated that appropriately with the cup of green tea. I do not drink during sailing, so there was little use to pull open a bottle of wine. I will postpone that until I get home. So now I am having to make up my mind if I want to do another 10 years with HAL, to make my forty years, or two years less, which will make it 40 years at sea. I did my cadetship with Incotrans (the old HAL cargo side) so it does not count towards my HAL years. We will see. God giving and good health might make me decide to do the other 10 years but Big Boss will have a big say in that as well of course. 

Today my focus was on a timely arrival at Fuerte Amador just outside Panama City. Here we stop for an evening call from 1800 hrs. to midnight, with tours to the Panama Canal Locks and Panama City. For the rest Amador does have some shops and restaurants at the location where the tender stops, so some guests might go ashore just to set foot ashore in Panama. Although the call lasts only until midnight, we do stay at anchor there. We have to use a cut off times to ensure that we have everybody back on board before we get the call from the Panama Canal authority to get ready for clearance and get into the convoy. That can be very early. At the moment we are looking at a boarding time of the pilot of 0400 hrs. but that means that I have to have the ship underway by 0300, including anchor heaving, swinging around and moving towards the assigned boarding area. Picking up the anchor always takes a long time here, as the holding ground is very dense mud that cakes itself around the chain as a tube of thick clay. To get that off, it takes a long time to get the chain in, as we have to use fires hoses and jet sprays to get it all off the shackles which are winched in one by one.

However we first had to get there and that was a challenge in itself. As Amador is under the jurisdiction of the Panama Canal, but not really part of its routine transit system, it is always a bit of a guess how it will work out. Sometimes the pilot comes out all the way, sometimes close to the anchorage; sometimes the agent is early and brings the authorities with him for the clearance, sometimes they all show up late. All depends on the work load for the canal itself. So I decided to arrive early, instead of just on time, to give us extra time to clear the ship and set things up. Maybe because I was early; they were early as well and we were at anchor and in full operation 30 minutes before the actual arrival time. This is good as it cuts the waiting time down for everybody as we can get a few boatloads ashore before the rush and the tours starts. The only minus-point was that a small supply boat had anchored exactly at my preferred anchor spot, so I had to stay another 1000 feet further out. That is not that much but during rush hour every foot helps in reduced distance. But he was not going to move for me of course so I had to leave it.

I arrived during sunset but by the time our tenders were lowered, it was dark and it was a dark night with many rain clouds in the area, but it stayed dry at our location. We are now in the changing months between the dry and wet season and that means we do not know at all what we will get when we are in Panama. After making sure that we were safely at anchor and the tender operation well underway, I left the rest to the Chief Officer and went to bed. He will close the tender service at midnight and then “sleep in” until the first locks. I will get up tomorrow morning at 02.15 pick up the anchor and get going and do whatever they want me to do, in order to get the ship as early into the Canal as possible.

The weather for tomorrow looks good, at least until lunch time as there are showers possible east of the Continental divide. Not a big problem, as a bit of a shower will cool things down nicely and the showers are not so intense at the moment anyway. The real rainy season has not started yet.