My day didn’t seem to have enough hours, so much to do and so little time.  Additionally, I had my Windoze (sic) PC changed yesterday and, of course, teething challenges, files not opening, etc, etc.  Hence the reason for me not writing, my apologies.  I’m a Mac man and I draft on a PC, then go to my Mac to finalise these posts, it’s a pain in the backside, however it seems to work.

As the title suggests, we are on our last full day at sea, 209 miles from the pilot station and already seeing an increase in traffic, (not cars, ships) 🙄

Tonight, we will be in the thick of it, the busiest shipping lane in the world, the Singapore Straits.  It’s 65 miles long, (although we don’t do all of it tomorrow) and in places, about 3 miles wide.  Every ship that needs to go from east to west and west to east, has to pass through them.  It is one large bottleneck of waterborne trade.  It has a Traffic System, everyone has lanes to adhere to, either east or west, however we are not actually ‘controlled’, just oversight from the Singapore Traffic Control. 

We will be supplementing our watch teams tonight, it’s going to be a long one for Gerd and I and I will be thankful when we are docked at the Cruise Bay, cruise terminal.

This is a radar screenshot from a few minutes ago; we are at 12 o’clock, with the orange clutter around us and the circles, white lines, triangles are other ships.  The majority of the ones towards 3 o’clock are going the same way as us, heading for the entrance to the traffic scheme, while 3 ships are heading north-east, having complete their transit of the straits.  The ‘squiggly’ (how nautical) lines are chart overlays, in this case undersea cables and the circles/lines towards 9 o’clock are oil and gas rigs, with their pipelines.  Busy place and we haven’t even got into it yet.

After days of dodging fishing boats, the officers who keep the Bridge watches are looking forward with anticipation to their watches.  It is what they train for and relish the opportunity to put that training to good use.  Gerd, or I, will be up there to provide oversight, our experience in such situations provides moral and ‘technical’ support.

I will post again from Singapore.