Saturday, 10 August

"This boat doth heave, and so do I"

-Scene from a long-lost Goth comic strip

I was expecting a change after Liverpool; I was expecting channel fever to kick in and for Ellen and me to start getting very antsy about Hamburg and the trip back to Paris.

I was not expecting the weather and the seas to change the way they did, and to start experiencing something like sea sickness for the first time on the voyage.

But in the middle of the night the ship began tossing and heaving to the point that it made itself known in our sleep.  Upon getting out of bed, it felt as though we were on a living carnival ride.  It was difficult to conduct one’s bathroom routines, and there was no way to put pants on while standing up.  As we went to breakfast Ellen commented that now she understood why there was a hand railing along every wall of the ship.

Hand railing running the entire length of the passageway

I was surprised to see by the sun’s position that we were heading south.  For some reason I had expected us to have reached the southern tip of England and to have turned east by then.  But no, we were still in the Irish Sea. (It was too rainy and windy to go outside to get our lat/long, but a Second Officer told me that's where we were).

I had not had sea state measurements in my conscious mind in years, and I couldn’t have even hazarded a decent guess as to what the sea state was.  One of the English maritime cadets told me the swells were 5 – 6 meters, and that the sea state was around 5.  I don’t know.  But there were large whitecaps everywhere, and all through the morning and into lunch it was difficult to walk.  Every now and then some containers would bang loudly.

Needless to say, meals were not very festive.  At least not for me.  It was all I could do to eat and get back to our cabin.


Here is a short video Ellen took from our cabin window showing the movement of the ship.

There was nothing to do but lounge around the cabin most of the day, either sitting or lying in bed while alternating between reading and dozing.  In my case, I finished a novel that had been in the ship's library: “Manhattan Beach,” by Jennifer Egan.  I had been pecking away at it and had expected to be about two-thirds done by Hamburg, but I finished it that afternoon at about 15:00.  And that was nice; it had been years since I'd just curled up with a good book and read for hours.

(And by the way, not only is “Manhattan Beach” a very good novel, but a significant amount of it takes place on a merchant ship.  So when Ellen read it, she had her nautical education enhanced through literature as it was being enhanced by experience.)

At about that point I checked the sun’s position, and it appeared as though we were going almost due east.  The sea had calmed down quite a bit, and there were not nearly as many whitecaps.

An hour later -- at about 16:30 -- Ellen stepped outside and then came back in to tell me that it was nice out, and that we were passing land again.  I went out, and indeed it was very nice: a warm breeze, an almost cloudless sky, and a relatively calm sea.  And yes, there was England off the port beam.  Sebastian was outside with his Android phone and told us it was the southernmost point of England.  I looked at his Google map and saw that it was the south tip of the Cornwall peninsula, which I think is called Lizard.

So I assumed the worst was over in terms of tossing and turning.  Soon we would be traveling up the very heavily-traveled English Channel, and it remained to be seen how that would go.  But at that particular moment, things were OK.

Apparently the weather and sea state had slowed us down a bit, and our arrival time in Hamburg had been pushed back to 15:00 on Monday.

The one really redeeming feature of it all was that Ellen had gotten to experience some moderately rough seas.  

Windmills

That evening we advanced the clocks an hour for the last time; we were then in the same time zone as Hamburg and Paris.  Our evening position – at 19:45 pm London time – was 45-51-42 N, 3-26-51 W.  We had gone considerably south, but we were still at approximately the same longitude that we had been in Liverpool. That is to say, we still had not crossed the prime meridian.  And as the sun set, the seas were choppy but relatively calm, and we were able to move about the ship without any special consideration.