It was dry but overcast when the Veendam arrived at the pilot station of Cape Canaveral. The port is located just south of Cape Canaveral of NASA fame. As a matter of fact you can see the launching hangar with the naked eye just to the North. The pilot was even a bit earlier than scheduled, something we always like about pilots, and by 7 am. the ship was well and good lined up to enter the port. I assume that there was a sort of port originally created by Mother Nature, sometime in the grey mists of time, but if there was there is not much left of it. Everything has been re-sculpted and that is still going on, on a grand scale. The port hopes that eventually one of the Oasis Class ships, there are some under construction, will home port in Port Canaveral. Thus they are widening the entrance channel and a new passenger terminal is being built, located just off the harbor masters office.
The leading lights which the pilot uses to keep the ship in the middle of the channel is inside the little black circle that I have drawn in the photo
The main fairway is straight in on a course of 270o and then ships move sideways to one of the inlets, dug off the main fairway. Currently all four cruise terminals are in the Northwest Corner and today all 4 were in use. Veendam on 1, Disney Wonder on 2, Norwegian Breakaway on 3, and the Europa on 4. (When counting from South, to West, to North) If all ships were full then there would have been 8,400 guests in port today. But for the Veendam that is already not true as we will get the balance of our guests onboard tomorrow in Fort Lauderdale. The funny thing to note when there are more cruise ships in port is that they do not all park in the same way.
The Veendam was nose in and the other three nose out alongside. You might think that how you dock basically depends on if the captain slept on his left side or right side the night before, but unfortunately that is not the logic behind it. It is all being dictated by the shore gangways. And if you want to use those, then you have to dock accordingly. Most shore gangways can only go up and down and that means that the ship has to park, often on the inch, with its access door lined up with the gangway.
In Port Canaveral these gangways are not jet walks and not regular gangways either but something of a mixture and for the Veendam to fit, it meant docking nose in. As predicted, the weather was overcast and not too warm, so we had perfect weather to lower the lifeboats for training. Due to our stay in Philadelphia – out of the water –it had been impossible for me to get lifeboats – into the water- with the result that all my training classes had to be put on hold until today.
Playing around with lifeboats is fun
Today was messing around with boats and it was as if we were all going on a school trip. So all day the lifeboat went up and down with small and very excited groups who were all inducted in the secrets of how to operate and drive a lifeboat. Not easy; lifeboat are designed to be full of people and when not they float very high on the water and the wind can blow them all over the place. Today there was no wind and that made it a little bit easier. We will leave tonight at 8 pm and then it is only a short dash to Fort Lauderdale. The entrance there is similar to Port Canaveral but once inside some of the docks are on the Inter coastal and that makes it a bit more complicated to get the ships lined up properly at their respective docks. And also the sailing course is different, can you do 270o in Port Canaveral, it is 267o in Ft Lauderdale.
The port of Cape Canaveral in the nautical chart.
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