Ships off Weymouth

[langstonelayabout]

The third pic down of the ship with the rusty stern is Arcadia, and not as I thought Oceana. It was too far off when I took the pic, and the heat shimmer made the name on the stern unreadable...... so I looked at the Dorset Echo website and by a process of elimination from their report came up with a name. Silly me!

Yes, defo Arcadia. The other way of telling is that she is the same design as Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth and is a P&O ship with a 'Cunard style' mast at the front. This ship is the 'unwanted ginger child' of Carnival cruises and was originally destined to be the Queen Victoria. Take a look here: MV Arcadia (2004) - Wikipedia

 

[Rustyknight]

Yes, defo Arcadia. The other way of telling is that she is the same design as Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth and is a P&O ship with a 'Cunard style' mast at the front. This ship is the 'unwanted ginger child' of Carnival cruises and was originally destined to be the Queen Victoria. Take a look here: MV Arcadia (2004) - Wikipedia

I posted the pic on a Facebook group, and was put right about it being Arcadia, not Oceana. It was suggested that "the giveaway is the panoramic glass lift midships, she’s the only one that has it. (It shows up as a blue/black vertical line.)"

The other surefire way is to get a bit closer......

 

[Denek]

I counted 17 tankers of one sort or another anchored off the Suffolk coast. Are they waiting for oil prices to rise??

 

[JumbleDuck]

This ship is the 'unwanted ginger child' of Carnival cruises and was originally destined to be the Queen Victoria.

So, they say, was the original Queen Mary, but when the chairman of Cunard asked King George V over a game of golf whether it would be acceptable to name his new ship after "Britain's greatest queen" the king misunderstood and replied "I shall ask my wife". It could have been worse, I suppose, as they might have ended up with the RMS Noël Coward.

Cunard then found out that the Caledonian Steam Packet Company already had a Queen Mary and had to give them a wad of cash to rename her Queen Mary II.

 

[JumbleDuck]

The good people of Greenock are strenuously resisting a proposal by Peel Ports to allow some cruise liners to lay up there for the duration. Apparently they are worried about overloading the local health services (a tramadol dispensing machine) but since the ships only have skeleton crews and not hundreds of desperate Filipinos, that seems a little unlikely.

Should cruise ships dock in Clyde during pandemic?

 

[Kukri]

The good people of Greenock are strenuously resisting a proposal by Peel Ports to allow some cruise liners to lay up there for the duration. Apparently they are worried about overloading the local health services (a tramadol dispensing machine) but since the ships only have skeleton crews and not hundreds of desperate Filipinos, that seems a little unlikely.

Should cruise ships dock in Clyde during pandemic?

I am no enthusiast for Peel Ports as a company; I have always found them one shade short of actually obnoxious. But the good people of Greenock are beyond obnoxious. Have nothing to do with them. Don’t go there. They don’t want outsiders. And don’t buy anything that they make there - if they still make anything.

 

[Kukri]

I counted 17 tankers of one sort or another anchored off the Suffolk coast. Are they waiting for oil prices to rise??

The coast of Suffolk between Lowestoft and Southwold is favoured for ship to ship transfers of Russian oil.

 

[dolabriform]

The coast of Suffolk between Lowestoft and Southwold is favoured for ship to ship transfers of Russian oil.

You can see them all year round from the coast.

 

[smert]

The QM2 carries her boats two decks higher than the others. This involves a different davit system and boarding arrangements, and is because she is designed to be able to operate as a Transatlantic liner, so she has the ability to maintain a much higher speed (30 knots!) through worse weather.

Her designer, Stephen Payne, was a small boy when the Queen Elizabeth caught fire in Hong Kong. The BBC “Blue Peter” programme covered this and said that nothing like her would be seen again. The young Payne wrote to the BBC to say that they were wrong, there would be a similar ship, and he would design her.

Here's an interesting documentary about the design and build of QM2:

 

[FlyingGoose]

I am no enthusiast for Peel Ports as a company; I have always found them one shade short of actually obnoxious. But the good people of Greenock are beyond obnoxious. Have nothing to do with them. Don’t go there. They don’t want outsiders. And don’t buy anything that they make there - if they still make anything.

Your being too nice to Greenock

 

[prv]

the good people of Greenock are beyond obnoxious. Have nothing to do with them. Don’t go there. They don’t want outsiders. And don’t buy anything that they make there - if they still make anything.

Only thing I remember Greenock for is that when I used to work for IBM, an office there would scan in our expense receipts.

The actual processing of the receipts was done in the Philippines (the I really does stand for “International”) but rather than ship stacks of paper around the world, they would be scanned in Greenock and sent electronically. The typical IBM stupid part was that my receipts were usually in electronic form to begin with (and if they hadn’t been, there was a scanner near my desk) but there was no way to send those files directly. I was required to print them and post them to Greenock, where someone else was paid to scan them in again.

Pete

 

[john_q]

Presumably it is cheaper to anchor off that go into port.

No port dues to pay if anchored out, one of the reasons cruise ships rarely stay overnight on port

 

[Kukri]

Here's an interesting documentary about the design and build of QM2:

Thank you for posting that.

That was fun! Took me back thirty three years.

The airline business does not offer an equivalent to the experience of taking a new merchant ship, or a new class of ships, through the stages of establishing the commercial viability of the concept, drawing a commercial specification, inviting tenders, selecting a shipbuilder, going through the drawings, the contract, the specifications, the construction, the problems along the way, the launching and naming, the trials, and finally seeing that we’ve got it right.

I am sure that civil engineering projects are similar, but you don’t have a ship at the end of them, and ships are special.

My experiences (I did it twice) were not on the heroic scale of the QM2, but they were still amongst the happiest and most demanding years of my life.

 

[Denek]

The coast of Suffolk between Lowestoft and Southwold is favoured for ship to ship transfers of Russian oil.

Did not know that. We only moved here at Christmas and our sailing has so far been south of Harwich si did not venture up this way.

 

[Kukri]

Did not know that. We only moved here at Christmas and our sailing has so far been south of Harwich si did not venture up this way.

It’s an established business here, with relatively smaller tankers transhipping Russian oil into the big stuff, and has been for a few years now.

There are “tell tale signs’ in Lowestoft
- a gaggle of workboats, to take cargo surveyors on and off, a string of Yokohama fenders (the great big black sausages covered in truck tyres) which separate the two ships during the operation and occasionally some workboats put into Southwold as well.

You used to see the same thing in Lyme Bay, with the workboats operating out of Brixham.

 

[SaltyC]

I counted 17 tankers of one sort or another anchored off the Suffolk coast. Are they waiting for oil prices to rise??

Currently there is a lack of storage space in Europe and most of the world due to falling demand, charter rates for VLCC's have increased for just sitting at anchor and being used a floating storage tanks. The situation is so bad that a few weeks ago Oil price in America fell into negative price, bought on a 'future' and as date approached they had no where to store so had to 'sell' it on.