Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Arrived in Singapore

We arrived in the nation city of Singapore from Batam in Indonesia, on November 11th, 2010 after a passage of 24 nautical miles (45 km) that took us just a few hours. In fact Batam and Singapore are so close we can see one from the other assuming we can see through the stream of super-cargos crossing the Singapore Strait! What makes this arrival in Singapore special is not the distance covered but the crossing of that strait and the port of Singapore. This is one, if not the, busiest port in the world and crossing the Singapore Strait must be done with care. First we got to our crossing point where the channel is the narrower, and then we looked on both sides and put the throttles to max speed and crossed the main ship channel at right angle. But this was just the beginning of the fun. Once on the other side we had to manage through the 50 km length of the Singapore maritime facilities but I’ll talk about this only in my next post…