19 March 2015; Half Moon Cay, Bahama’s.

My apologies that there was no blog yesterday but my computer crashed and I lost my literary outburst for that day. Also not enough time to rewrite it as the hours are scarce while this training class goes on. But yesterday we were at sea sailing on a straight line from St. Thomas to the South side of Half Moon Cay, at least that is what we call it.

The official name of the island is Little San Salvador Island and it is located to the South West of San Salvador Island one of the larger islands among the thousands of islands, cays, banks and reefs of the Bahamas. San Salvador Island is most famous for the fact that it is claimed (one of the many places to do so) that Columbus made his first landfall here in 1492 and thus discovered the new world. Although he thought he was in India. Hence calling the locals Indians a name they got stuck with forever.  They built a statue on the North East point of the island which can be seen from the sea if you bring the ship to about a mile off the beach.

Just to the west there is a smaller island called Little San Salvador which has a size of approx. 32,000 acres and a lot of that acreage is taken up by a lake. Holland America has a very long term lease on 16,000 acres on the west side. Through the years it has been slowly developed as a private island for beach calls. Princess has one as well, so does NCL and so does Mickey Mouse. However we keep winning prizes for our island that it is the best of them all and that indicates that Holland America has done a pretty good job here.

They decided to call the place Half Moon Cay. If you look at our company logo, it shows a large two funnel ship and a smaller old sailing vessel in the front of it. The large ship is the Nieuw Amsterdam from 1936 and the sailing vessel is the Haelve Maen or the Half Moon in English. This was the ship which Englishman Henry Hudson used to explore the East Coast of the USA. He did this on behalf of the Dutch West Indian company and they were looking for new trading grounds. Henry Hudson sailed up a big river on the East Coast and that river is called the Hudson River nowadays. So everything is nicely linked into our Dutch History.

The tender port is to the left below the ship. (Photo courtesy of Holland America Line)

Holland America created an artificial tender port out of the rocks and thus we can land our guests safely and directly next to the beach and in front of the little village that was built here. The island can handle about 3,500 guests without feeling crowded and thus 2 HAL ships can call at the same time. Today we were by ourselves but the day after tomorrow we will be with the Eurodam.  Carnival Cruises do not have their own island and sometimes they call at Half Moon Cay but only when there is no HAL ship in.

Through the years the islands facilities have greatly expanded and I will tell some more about that the day after tomorrow.  Today we could not anchor as the wind (very little luckily) was from the south and it would have slowly pushed the Noordam towards the beach. Thus the captain decided to stay on the engines and drift at a safe distance from the entrance, while the shore tenders took the guests  to and from the ship.

Here at HMC the anchorage is on a ledge in very shallow waters in a similar way as at Grand Cayman. The sea bottom rises very steeply and while the anchor is on a ledge in 20 feet of water, the stern of the ship is laying over a 1000 feet of water.  Because it is so shallow, the ship cannot swing around the anchor but needs a constant North Easterly wind to keep it off the beach. Today there was no N.E. wind and thus the ship had to drift.

We were here from 0800 to 1500 hrs. today and then it was time to set sail for our home port Ft. Lauderdale/Port Everglades where we will end this 10 day cruise tomorrow.  Then we will start an 11 day cruise which will take us via HMC and Grand Turk towards the South West Caribbean.