Picture time!

And here she is! The Grande Ellade, all 600ft of her, 11 decks, 82 feet high, built in South Korea in 2004 for the Grimaldi Line of Napoli Italy.

She can carry over 4,000 automobiles on 11 decks, and up to 700 40'x8' shipping containers on the lower three decks. The line of windows across the ship below the yellow line are the bridge windows, and we were invited by the Captain to spend as much time as we wanted on the bridge, as long as we didn't touch anything! The best times on the bridge were when we were entering or leaving port and since almost all the pilots spoke English to our Italian crew, we were able to hear every command to the helmsman.

If the bridge is where the center of authority is on the ship, the "ramp" is where she pays her way. When the ship ties up alongside a pier a huge articulated ramp is lowered from her stern and all her cargo is driven on or off across it. In this photo containers are being unloaded from Deck #3, but sometimes the container platforms held pieces of machinery and in one case thousands of rolls of newsprint on its way to Alexandria Egypt from a paper mill in Sweden. Although we were not allowed to spend any time hanging around the ramp itself because of safety concerns, once we were off the ship we could stand at a safe distance and watch the proceedings to our hearts delight. 

Just to give you a perspective on the size of this ship and its equipment, standing next to the ramp control office on the upper deck with its little window are two of the other passengers waving at us down on the dock. We often walked the length of the upper deck to the stern to see the wake behind us, or just for exercise since five roundtrips between stern and bridge equalled one mile. And depending on what had been loaded up there on Deck #11, sometimes we had to walk in between the 500 cars parked up there, a little like going for a walk in a parking garage. On the dock are parked two very large dump trucks heading from Salerno Italy to Antwerp Belgium, so large that they were the last things to be loaded in the huge space behind the ramp opening, and at every stop they had to be driven off and parked so that other things behind them could be unloaded. If you were ever a kid who loved machinery, you would love taking a trip on one of these ships, for you will see machines you never thought existed. At one point on deck #5 there were parked two "tapping" machines, machines that looked like huge street sweepers but had 8' high and 6' wide cylindrical cast iron "pots" suspended in their middles. If anyone knows what a tapping machine is please let the rest of in on it. 

More photos and narrative as we get time,

Lynn & Linda