Sunday 14th July 2013
Well today was a hive of activity, we have to get the boat around to the entrance of the canal, which they call the Flats, to get the boat measured to go through, this is step one.
This took a good chuck of the morning I can tell you, some of it was researching Aut ( the autopilot ) on google as if you remember, he was having a hissy fit as we where coming in here and we really did not want to start out again with him not working properly.
But in the end we just had to go, as it was going to take us about 4 hours to get there and we so wanted to get there before dark.
Well I had not tied everything down real well as The Captain said it would not be too rough,.......... big mistake.
It was rough, we rolled from side to side so bad, we had things flying from one side of the boat to the other, most were in the galley, and not a huge amount of damage well just the kettle, but we can still use it.
Now I don't think I have ever seen so many cargo ships in one area in my life, talk about stressful, I guess you have seen the picture I put up on facebook, of the AIS by now.
Man they were everywhere the alarm was going off like you would not believe, and flashing all their details just one after the other.
Most of these are at anchor, which was fine as we could just work our way around them all, but we also had to weed out the ones that were moving as well.
This was not easy, several times we had ships almost running as over from behind and in front and from both sides, man we have never got so up close and personal with so many ships.
But we made it, here, we are sitting here at the entrance to the canal, although we can't actually see the canal.
We have been watching ship after ship go past, and tomorrow the guy will come out to measure us, and than we can book the crossing.
Well tomorrow is another day.