Paul has been sharing these posts by e-mail and allowed us to share them here. Paul is 1st Mate on the delivery trip of LLT's new Manitoulin. There will be lots of pictures and more details on his blog when he gets back:
http://shiphotos.blogspot.ca/
Fri 10/2/2015
On board Lower Lakes' Manitoulin about 60 miles East-South-East of Shanghai, China.
We departed from the shipyard yesterday morning, came down the Yangtzee River
and out to sea for trials, which lasted all night.
We are anchored in position 30.8 north and 122.6 East.
Put these co-ordinates into this site,
http://www.latlong.net/
to see where we are.
The most amazing thing in the last 36 hours has been the amount of
ship traffic. Unless you can see it you can't understand it. There is a junction at the end of the
river where ships cross east-west and north-south. CPA's (closest point of approach)
of other ships is frequently 600 to 1200 feet at full speed! When taught in school to give
a 3 mile cushion between your ship and others, well that rule goes out the window.
Add in a bunch of fishing boats. And the fact that we were doing sea-trials amidst all this stuff...
Our AIS, which is an electronic device we use to identify ships, can show 50 ships at once. There were easily 200
within range throughout our sea-trials. Boy, they don't teach this in school!
VHF 16 is a constant blather. Quite annoying. The VTS radio channel (Vessel Traffic Services)
is also constant blather.
Tomorrow at 1200 China Time, which is 12 hours ahead of Eastern Time, we leave the
anchorage and head South-east until about 7 degrees North latitude,
then we head east for Panama. It will take about a month to get to Panama.
As for the small city of Jiangyin where the shipyard is located...I didn't stray much
into town so can only comment on the shipyard and the atmosphere. Busy and smoggy.
Dirty and humid.
The river is a handy dump for all sorts of things. Jiangyin has 2 million people.
Shanghai, just upriver, has about 30 million I believe.
A couple days back we got some wind as a typhoon passed offshore. This kicked up the river
and caused some rather large waves. There are a lot of small ships that carry sand, stone, coal
etc but they have no hatch covers and no Load-Lines so they load real deep. If the waves get up
the ship is in danger of swamping and sinking. This happened to one right beside us in the river,
and the thing filled up with water and sank within about a minute. Everyone got off.
Good to be reminded about your vulnerability in this profession because sometimes
we don't realize how dangerous this can be.
More tomorrow I hope.
Paul
Paul Beesley