venison on middelbank

Sunday 25th February 2007

4:48 p.m. CET Last night was even more quiet than Friday, and predictably most of the passengers were from the continent, on their return trip. As it was so quiet I played only instrumentals all evening, and by 11 o’clock there was only one group left in the bar, consisting of German students. They were singing along to some of the songs, and they applauded when I finished (which needless to say was earlier than usual).

When I got up this morning we had already dropped off the passengers in Belgium and were on our way to Rotterdam. The weather was excellent, and I took a few photos from the deck.



The ship is now currently sat in dry-dock, we arrived just over an hour ago, and we are secured in the berth with the sluice gate closed waiting for the water to drain. I would guess we are probably seven, maybe eight kilometres inland. At the moment I am sat in the piano bar, taking the opportunity to warm up having spent virtually the whole day on deck!

Lunch was served in the main restaurant which was a refreshing change, and the menu was quite something, namely venison served with gratin potatoes and stuffed leeks. (Middelbank was the name of the portion of the sea we were sailing in at the time, hence the title.)

It was the first time that I had seen Europort in daylight since I did my first stint on the ferries back in ’99, and I saw some familiar features, and I took pictures of many of them. One of them was the Pride of Hull (the boat I was working on a few weeks ago) a short distance away that we went past on our way down the channel.



Here are a couple more photos that I took while we were heading inland:



And also one I took while we were in the dry dock itself:



I took too many to include on here, so check out my web space for the full set.

Monday 26th February 2007

12:04 p.m. After blogging yesterday I went and had dinner (again in the restaurant) then went up to the show-bar for a couple of hours with Dale, Sapphire, Louise (the children’s entertainer), Mel (a musical Philipino crew member) and the ship’s police, Andy and Bob. Dale and I had a jam on piano and guitar, then Mel joined in and we jammed out one of his songs with a simple back-beat and it sounded really good. Afterwards we sat around chatting and listening to some reggae which was really chilled, then we went up to the crew rec room where people were singing karaoke and playing pool. Ended up staying there for the rest of the evening.

It was weird sailing without any passengers, but there was a nice relaxed atmosphere and it was good to get a night’s break. We ended up leaving Rotterdam earlier than scheduled so we docked back in Hull at 10 o’clock this morning.

Back to work tonight, but it is likely to be very quiet until Friday.