Life at sea

It's only two weeks left until I'm going back to Atlantic Compass for dry-docking in Dunkerque. As usual I don't know what happened to my vacation, it's just passing by quickly... I haven't done much, that's for sure. Tomorrow I will go see my parents for a couple of days.

I had a nice trip on Compass, lots of work, nice people and (hopefully) I learned a lot:-) After my next trip I have no idea what's going to happen, but for the time being I really don't care. I guess I will figure out soon enough what plans they have for me.

Dry-docking is really interesting, perhaps because anything can happen and it always does! The whole vessel turns into a complete chaos and more people than you could ever count are running around, just as confused as yourself. Half of them come to you and ask questions that you can't answer and meanwhile you have to try to keep an eye on the other half, so they don't do anything they're not supposed to. Apart from that you have lots of things to do yourself and since you've (quite often, at least in my case) never done it before there's a pretty good chance that you're not half as confident as you use to be. Add to all this that you experience some problems with the language (my french is worse than the average frenchmans engligsh) and there you got my view of a normal dry-docking. And I just love it! I have tried to figure out what makes it all so funny and the only answer I can come up with is that it is so out of the ordinary life on board. You get to see another place (which is something we don't do very often at the ACL vessels), lots of new people and the work is different.

Companion is now on her way to Dunkerque and will dry-dock on Sunday. They were supposed to be there Friday, but Cartier will be a bit delayed, she had some troubles with the rudder. So, perhaps this means that we will be a little delayed as well. I will sign on Compass in Liverpool and first go to Antwerp and unload all the cargo before we're off to Dunkerque. I hope we will have internet access there. Then I will hopefully do a better job and keep you up to date.

The pictures are from the last dry-docking with Companion in Brest 2004. That was my best trip ever, hope I will enjoy it just as much this time!