15 March 2010; Amazon, back to open sea.

It is 400 miles from Parintins back to Macapa Pilot Station and from there 160 miles to the Amazon Bar. Helped with 3 to 4 knots of current the Prinsendam raced down the river. It was my intention to arrive at Macapa sometime between 3 and 4 pm so I could have the ebbing tide with me while going back to sea. High water at Macapa was at 15.17 hrs and if I could make that, we would sail with the ebbing current towards the North Atlantic Ocean while still having a good water level at the bar. It worked out quite well. The pilots wanted to get off the ship as soon as they could. I could not figure out whether it was because there was another ship waiting for them or that they wanted to go home but they kept urging for more speed. However I found 17 knots plus 5 knots of current, totaling 22 knots more than enough. Maybe one of the pilots had to get home quickly to celebrate the championship of his soccer team. He is the chairman of the Football Club of Belem and while we were at anchor in Parintins, he spent all afternoon on the bridge wing watching TV on his laptop to see if his club would win. They did, so he was a very happy camper but being stuck on the river, had little chance to join in the celebrations.

That brings me to answering a few questions that were raised by the guests. Questions that I had never even thought about.

1. How high is Manaus above sea level? Well with the strong current, you might expect that it is quite elevated as water tends to flow faster when greater heights are involved. However the Amazon gets its momentum from the sheer quantity of rain water that comes out of the Amazonian basin. Manaus is just over 25 meters above sea level and that is about 81 feet That means that for every mile that we travelled up river, the Prinsendam gained 2 centimeters or just under one inch in elevation.
2. What distance did we travel on the river: From the Bar to the dock of Manaus it was 889 nautical miles or 1022 statue miles or 1646 kilometers as measured in the chart. The real mileage is a little bit more as the ship never follows the course line exactly. Even when on a river.
3. How do you navigate on the river. We use the normal gadgets apart from keeping a visual lookout. GPS for positions, visual compass bearings when passing villages (if indicated in the chart) and the radar very extensively. The dense forest on the shore shows up very well on the radar and by measuring the distance from the ship to the shore we can nicely follow the river and stay at the right distance to avoid the sand banks. The river follows a line of least resistance and if you stay in the centre of the current, you always have the deepest water. Sometimes that is only 500 feet or less from the shore line. That brings into play a more unusual navigational tool, a search light. By keeping the beam of the light on the bank of the river you can see how far you are off and keep a steady distance. With good radar it is not a necessity but all the local traffic, without radar, use this as their major tool of safely navigating.
4. There were less creepy crawlies than we were expecting. Correct, with the river being much wider this time, due to the rain fall, we did not have to go that close to the river banks (see point 3) as is normally the case. Hence less of them made it to the ship. We still had an abundance of crickets, grass hoppers and other insects around but the decks were not “as black” with them as could have been the case.

We made it to Macapa just before 4 pm. and disembarked the two pilots, the two immigration officials (who cleared the ship en-route, so we did not have to anchor and wait for clearance) and the ships agent. Then we sped up again, riding the out going tide to open sea. We passed several ships at anchor waiting for clearance and maybe they were also waiting for our two pilots. While leaving the pilot station we were buzzed by a Navy helicopter, who came to check if we had been cleared by the authorities. It seems that some ships simply carry on to open sea without signing off with customs. They hung around the ship for a little while, looking for young and nubile ladies in bathing costumes around the swimming pool but upon not finding any turned away quite un-happy. The co-pilot made a very distinctive gesture in my direction indicating so. They left just too early otherwise they could have seen something very un-usual. Our cruise director in tuxedo, swimming across the equator, with guests in the lido pool, as we crossed the equator at 16.35 hrs. for the last time.

With about 5 knots of current in the back we were flushed down to the end of the river and by midnight we should be reaching the bar. There I will slow the ship down to about 15 knots to reduce the squat and by tomorrow 3 am we should be back in the North Atlantic ocean. This will be the end of our Amazon Expedition and an real adventure it has been. The current of the river dictated where we went and at what time and the politics in Manaus dictated that we were not going anywhere at all for awhile. Who says cruising is boring………………

A final look at our stay at Manaus…………… courtesy from our ships agent there.