The first report from "on board" the freighter

Finally the big moment arrives! The "moment" was at 8:30 on Sunday morning, and the "big" part was the ship Grande Ellade that we boarded at the Royal Portbury Docks near Bristol England. And boy is this ship big! She is over 600 feet long, 106 feet wide, and from the top deck (#11) it is 88 feet to the water! She is called an RO/RO Carrier, which stands for roll-on/roll-off as all cargo is driven up a huge two-lane ramp at the stern of the ship. She is capable of carrying 4716 automobiles on the 11 decks, some of which can move up or down according to the height of the cars. And she can carry another 750 40'x8' shipping containers on decks 3-6. She has her own massive forklifts to lift the containers off the trailers that they come on board on, and on this voyage she also has a deck full of construction equipment, front end loaders, huge tracked backhoes, etc. And she has Renaults, Peaugots, Fords, Opels, and at least four other models of cars that I don't recognize.

We left Bristol on the ebbing tide at about 6:00pm on Sunday, and to get out into the estuary we went through a set of locks that keep the water level high enough in the dock area so the ships don't go up or down with the 40' difference between low and high tides. We had a pilot until we were almost into the Irish sea, and 10 hours later we picked up another pilot who guided us into Cork Ireland. We unloaded a couple of hundred cars and a few containers, and then that evening left for Esberg Denmark where we are due this evening at 9:00pm. We spent most of yesterday in the English Channel, and today are in the North Sea where the winds are 35 knots with big seas coming right at us.

Our cabin is spacious and nicely set up, much like an economy motel room with a smallish bathroom but with plenty of hot water in the shower. We eat in the Officers Mess with the Captain and his officers, most of whom are Italians with one Bulgarian 2nd mate and one Filipino 2nd mate. The other 20 or so crew members are a mixture of Italian or Filipino, and the cabin steward who serves our meals is a young Filipino also.

Life on board is like being a member of the crew with no responsibilities except to show up for meals, which are great! Breakfast is mostly coffee and breads, but lunch and dinner are all 4 course meals with 250ml of wine for each of us. For lunch today we had sauteed octopus for the second course, and pork for the third! The first course is always some sort of Pasta, and the last is cheese or fruit. And in the morning the bread is still hot from the oven it was baked in! There is at the moment only one other passenger, a retired NYC fireman who is leaving us next Saturday in Southampton. But we are due to pick up a German couple in Denmark tonight, and another couple in Antwerp on Friday.

Right off the bat we were invited on to the navigation bridge, and I (Lynn) have been spending a lot of time up there watching the ship traffic and the sea. Yesterday I counted 25 ships within sight at the entrance to the English Channel, and we are almost always in sight of at least one, and now in the North sea we see lots of oil platforms.

We hope to do some walking in Esberg Denmark tomorrow morning before the ship leaves for Wallham Sweden, but that depends on how long we will remain in port and when the lift the ramp up. We are a day and a half behind schedule at the moment, so we don't expect too much port time until we catch up, probably somewhere in the Med.

More about the ship and hopefully something about Denmark later,
Lynn & Linda