Around the world - Pitcairn and icebergs

Twenty years forward to 1999. After returning to Canada, I was fortunate to stop work when relatively young. I decided to go to sea. Why on freighters? One reason was the joy of avoiding airports and aircraft. Another the prospect of arriving on the other side of the world with no jetlag. Still another the unusual places you could visit on a cargo ship.

Melbourne Star (also see this month's second posting – ‘Some background’), which I sailed from the States to New Zealand, was the occasional supply ship for Pitcairn. It is one of the most remote inhabited islands on the planet. So isolated that it made an ideal hiding place for some of the Bounty mutineers.

Here I am with Pitcairn as a backdrop. Every few months, modern life’s necessities would be dropped off and then Pitcairn would be left behind, like Robinson Crusoe, but with a short-wave radio.

My first freighter voyage was a great success, so, a couple of years later, I decided to go the whole hog. I sailed on one of the last ships to regularly circle the world, not by Panama and Suez, but under the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. This was roughly the course of the 19th Century clipper ships, which appealed to my sense of history. Just as well I did it as nowadays no ships – passenger or cargo – regularly circumnavigate via the Great Southern Ocean.

Palliser Bay was a British vessel with ties to the historic Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company. Here she is in Napier, New Zealand.

Palliser Bay’s route is now history and so are she and the company that owned her. The route became uneconomical, the ship too old and the company was bought out, as venerable lines were snapped up by huge international shipping firms in the early 21st Century. These are some of the issues I hope explore further in my upcoming blog.

For now, we will leave Palliser Bay deep in the Great Southern Ocean between New Zealand and the tip of South America. We are spending weeks at sea while heading back to Europe; the ship is rolling heavily and the second officer has just emerged from the galley claiming he was “chased by a sack of potatoes!”

In 2006, I decided to combine a trip down the St. Lawrence from Montreal and a return to England. This was aboard the Eilbek, which regularly sailed to Liverpool and Antwerp. Her outbound track was north of Newfoundland and into iceberg country.

I rather like this picture of two Eilbek crewmembers working their way aft.

Here we are squeezing into the container terminal at Liverpool.

In Antwerp, tractors are loaded for export to Canada. Canada once was one of the world’s major suppliers of farm equipment. Such is the impact of globalization.

And finally from the Eilbek, the captain and chief engineer after dinner one night. It is, as you can see, a pleasant evening. However, we are just a couple of days away from an disagreeable spell of weather, which you can take a look at in my second posting.

I’ve admired the senior officers with whom I’ve sailed. They are calm. I am not. They are highly professional and competent. I’m a dilettante. In a hurricane, they’re the ones I’d want in control. I’d be cowering in my cabin, experiencing a sudden bout of religious mania.

Next – what preparations do you make for months at sea?