Oh these mighty seas!

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CS:
Thurs 19 March:
We were out of the river and into the Atlantic by about 7am. The weather is sunny, cloudless and the sea calm. Captain still wants to outrun bad weather, our current speed indicates an ETA in Antwerp of 27 March. The weather turned nasty during the night. The Low has obviously caught us, the sea is lumpy and a grim gun metal grey, the sky a grey canopy of low clouds and we have strong winds. The ship’s motion so far is not too bad; we’ll see how long it lasts.
We advanced our clocks an hour overnight and on Saturday 21 March we advanced them another hour. The weather continued to build up over night. By morning just before light it was very bumpy and there was heavy ice and snow on the window casings and the cargo containers on deck. The sea got heavier still, and the motion became quite uncomfortable. We dropped speed back to 7 knots but that resulted in considerable wallowing and every now and then we copped a major shudder. Later we picked up speed and the sea settled a little.
Sunday 22 March: Weather is cold, overcast and grim but the ship’s motion is still easy enough so we are hopefully moving our way into better weather and calmer waters but visibility is virtually nil due to heavy fog. We are beyond Newfoundland and into open Atlantic but at a rather more northerly latitude than originally scheduled in order to avoid the worst of the rolling. The Captain fine tunes our course throughout to ensure the smoothest possible track.
Monday 23 March: we are into the 13th week of the year. We are travelling reasonably evenly, the swell is noticeable but the sea is fairly calm. There is heavy mist which closed around us as we watched. The weather behind us has turned really nasty. There is a tight low over Philadelphia blowing winds of ‘hurricane’ force which has kept our sister ship Rickmers Shanghai in port. There are two other lows in the vicinity. We are doing 20 knots in a due easterly direction and trying to out run everything. We are sheltered within a largish high pressure at present, stable air indicated by the mist but the situation is unpredictable. We are about half way across the open sea, clear of the bottom tip of Greenland (to our north). Weather improved during the day, clear skies with some cloud later, calm seas prevailed and the night sky was clear.
Wednesday 25 March: and we are 1,500k from our destination.
On Thursday we arrived in the English Channel around 3pm. We except to pick up the pilot at 11am tomorrow then sail 7 hours up the river.
By Friday morning we are still in open water but we had passed Dover about 3am. Around 9.30am we collected our first pilot and a second one came on board about 11.30. We worked our way up the Channel and into the smaller Dutch channel. We proceeded slowly up river which is quite shallow in places so negotiating the narrow deeper channel in a ship of our dimensions is a precise activity, until we got to a set of port gates (like locks except there is variable variation in water levels depending on the tides) at about 3pm. We had a longish wait to get through the gate into the port area proper. The road bridge at either end of the lock is raised and lowered as the ships and other vessels proceed through the gate. We sailed across to Churchill dock where we moored in Antwerp about 5.15pm.

PP:
Avast ye lubbers!! Batten down the hatches! Reef the mainsail!! The sleet, snow and ice we experienced the first day out of Philadelphia was quite a dramatic change, however we managed to outrun it into calmer waters the next day. Then the fog was around for days. CS has described the activity while I observed (supervised??!!). Antwerp is a nice place and we managed a nice meal in town on arrival and before we had even been cleared by customs!

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Photos

The Atlantic
After we caught the good weather!