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The sun is rising and thankfully its another nice, calm day.
We are just south of Nova Scotia, or for those Latin fans amongst you, New Scotland. Actually its about time there was a new Scotland - the other one looks a bit worn out these days.
For the history buffs, Nova Scotia was colonised by the French in 1604. The good old British Empire took control in 1713 and founded the capital, Halifax, in 1749 - Presumably someone from Yorkshire was on the naming committee, although it doesn’t appear that the attempts to enforce residents to wear flat caps and own whippets succeeded.
Today’s track of the day is “Ocean Cloud” by Marillion, from their 2004 album Marbles. Please allow 17 minutes and 59 seconds to listen to it in all its glory.
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So far so good - its Force 6 wind (27 mph) and the sea is only rough (12 ft waves). And, no its not 3:51am - the ship’s time is showing the time in New York for some reason - its actually 2 hours later.
We are now approaching Newfoundland. For those interested in our Titanic obsession, we are also approaching the area where the great ship sank as marked on the above chart. As the historians amongst you will remember, the ship reported her location at the time as 41° 46′ N, 50° 14′ W, presumably thinking they were on course on the great circle route shown by the line above. The wreck was actually found in 1985, by the famous oceanographer Robert Ballard, at 41° 43′ N, 49° 56′ W.
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The QM2 is a marvel of modern water/wastewater treatment technology. Four flash evaporators and a reverse osmosis unit desalinate sea water to create drinking water, producing 1,000 tons of fresh water daily. A membrane bioreactor large enough to handle a town of 8,000 inhabitants converts the waste on the ship into clean water that can be released into the sea. Incinerators on board eliminate the residuals that are impossible to recycle or to recuperate and the heat generated from this is used to as energy elsewhere on the ship. Paper, plastics, glass and packed residuals are compacted to be recycled on shore. So no floaters from this ship.
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Unfortunately this day isn’t quite as nice as other days.
We should have guessed the weather was going to be bad when sick bags started to appear all around the ships.
There is a force 10 wind (according to Sir Francis Beaufort’s scale this means winds of 60 mph on average - there’s only 2 steps left in his scale, and the last one is hurricane) across the ship and waves of 18-27 feet. Even in a ship this size you notice that.
So, to some of the obvious disadvantages of this weather for the guest on board:
- table tennis becomes hard to play as you don’t know what the angle of the table will be.
- The jaccuzi doesn’t have much water in it, although on the plus side you don’t have to get up to get in the pool as its mostly on the floor.
- You have to be careful where you walk for fear of slipping in someone’s lunch, made available for the second time.
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By lunchtime today the main problem seems to have been resolved and we have started off again, albeit at a lower speed (18 kts) than before (21-23 kts) whilst the engineers investigate a “technical issue” with one of the ship’s propulsion pods.
So we can’t help but be reminded of the Titanic (again!):
- It's the 15th today (the day in April 1912 the Titanic sank)
- The ship has a technical issue (although in the case of the Titanic this was a large hole made by contact with an iceberg)
- The musicians in the restaurant last night were playing “My Heart Will Go On” (thankfully without Celine Dion)
- The QM2’s designer, Stephen Payne, is on board this voyage (Thomas Andrews, the Titanic designer was onboard its first and only voyage).
We can only be grateful that one connection was missing: Harland & Wolff in Belfast (builders of the Titanic) couldn’t finance the building of the QM2 so instead it was built by some cheese eating surrender monkeys called Chantiers de l’Atlantique in St Nazaire near Nantes.
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No, I’m not up at 2am taking pictures of our TV screen. This was the time the QM2 stopped. So its 7am now and we are still where we were 5 hours ago, 721.3 nautical miles from Southampton.
At least the power is back on now, its a bit dark otherwise with just the emergency lighting.