I will be on Minerva for around 4 months, the first month will be spent cruising round the United Kingdom (although mainly the Scottish islands) with a jaunt up to Iceland. She will then be relocating back to the sunny Mediterranean with a few cruises around the Mediterranean and a trip up to the Black Sea.

I should leave, if all goes to plan some time in November before she heads off to Asia for the winter season.

By the time we got to the hotel and our park tickets it was around midday. We went straight to the park and worked out way around the rides; we managed to do pretty much every ride on the thursday, although we left Th13teen, Sonic Spinball and Rita until the friday.

As we stayed in the Alton Towers hotel we got into the park an hour before everyone else on the friday morning, so we used this time to go on Sonic Spinball and then went and joined the queue for Th13teen ahead of everyone else.

So over the two days we did every ride except Oblivion – I didn’t fancy that, but Air and Nemesis are brilliant.

Th13teen has a lot of hype built up about it and while it was fun it really wasn’t that scary!

Unfortunately the good weather didn’t last until the Friday, it started pouring around midday so we returned to one of the hotels to have lunch and then drove back to Wales.

From where I left off last time, we finished in Antarctica having hit the worst storm I have ever experienced while on our way from Antarctica to the Falkland Islands. It was so bad we had to just put the swell on our stern and maintain minimum speed until it had passed. 2 days pitching and rolling in waves which were the same height as the bridge was not fun!

We eventually pulled into Stanley, Falkland Islands rather late – so late in fact that we proceeded directly alongside a bunker barge to take on additional fuel and then departed a few hours later for Mar del Plata, Argentina.

After leaving South America we returned across the Atlantic to Africa, visiting Senegal and Gambia before heading up to the Canary Islands and back into the Mediterranean.

We arrived into Piraeus a day early and then proceeded to an island called Syros to enter dry dock to allow for repairs on the starboard propellor shaft. After spending 2 days there we returned to Piraeus and collected the passengers who had just disembarked – they had been unable to fly home due to the volcanic ash. We stayed alongside in Piraeus for a few days until flights were arranged for the passengers stuck onboard, then we proceeded back to Syros where over the period of 3 weeks we were in and out of dry dock several times.

This unfortunately meant that we missed going through the Suez Canal to Jordan, but did provide an opportunity to blast and paint the ships hull while they were carrying out maintenance on the damaged propellor shaft.

After leaving dry dock, we went straight to Istanbul and picked up our passengers, for what was my last cruise, and then went up to the Black Sea visiting Ukraine & Bulgaria before back to Turkey, Greece through the Corinth Canal and onto Malta where I flew home after a 3 day handover.

I eventually joined the ship 2 days later than originally planned on the 8th of February and was assigned to the 12 – 4 watch. This contract I am now a second officer so am spending my time keeping the thousands of Admiralty charts up to date.

As I write this we are alongside in Ushuaia, Argentina for the last time this season. We sail tomorrow evening for 3 days in Antarctica then on to the Falkland Islands before heading north to Buenos Aires and onwards to Brazil.

After spending a few weeks sailing off the coast of Brazil and crossing the Atlantic to Africa, we will eventually be back in the Mediterranean and Red Sea until mid June when she heads to the UK.

Dolphins Bow Surfing

Dolphins surfing on the pressure wave created by Minerva in the Mediterranean sea, filmed from the bridge wing.

Backing out of the ice

The view from the bridge wing as the cruise ship Minerva backed out of an ice sheet in Antarctica. The reason? It was decided that it would be easier to park the bow in the ice and use the engines on slow ahead, than it would be to constantly manoeuvre the ship to maintain position.

So what’s changed? The blog is now handled by WordPress instead of BlogOff, this proved rather harder than anticipated as WordPress seems to store lots of useless information, but its now all copied across. Unfortunately I was unable to copy across the comments that people had made on my old blog, so there all gone.

Sticking with the blog, it is now arranged into categories with anything relating to my time in the Merchant Navy or my cadet ship now located in the Merchant Navy category.

This year has me participating in something has been around for a while “project 365”, the idea is simple… you take a photo of something every day for 365 days (thats conveniently a year). You can start one any time, but I decided to start on the 1st of January 2010 and plan to continue through to the 31st of December.

I am using flickr to store my project and have written a little script to copy my project 365 photos and place them on this site, you can view my project photos by clicking the link at the top of this page. If you are interested in doing your own and want the script I am using, let me know and I will give you the details. If enough people are interested I might even make it as a plugin for WordPress.

RSS! The location of the RSS feed has now moved so if you are used to reading this site offline you will have to update your reader with the new address.

Anyway thats about it, there are still one or two small glitches to be fixed but otherwise all is now working as it should, feel free to let me know what you think!

Well, I am now back home after a mammoth journey home which had me flying from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires, then onto Frankfurt, then London Heathrow where my journey encountered a small problem due to British Airways canceling all their flights and abandoning me at their brand new Terminal 5 at 1am in the morning! A quick phone call had me on a BMI flight the next morning and I finally reached Edinburgh at 11am on the 22nd (Minus my baggage of course, as British Airways had misplaced that at Terminal 5).

Anyway, that aside Christmas was good, I got a selection of clothes and chocolate as I didn’t really want much and an iTunes gift card which is already being used.

Since the new year is approaching I might change my web site design as this one is getting a bit tiring. I am also going to take part in this “photo 365″ project, which I’ll post some more about tomorrow.

Since my last enter, a long time ago, I have crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, sailed down the coast to Uruguay, up the river Plate to Buenos Aires, across to the Falkland Islands, then South Georgia and finally down south to Antarctica.

Antarctica for those of you who have never been is very cold, its also quite pretty, with lots of ice bergs and glaciers everywhere and it certainly was interesting dodging in and out of all the ice bergs and other pieces of floating ice.

Getting back to the title, I have now visited 5 of the 7 continents of the world, namely; Europe, North America, South America, Africa and the latest Antarctica, with me having gone ashore at Paradise Bay to climb up a big hill, take some photos and slide back down it.

The weather in Antarctica itself is reasonably good, the seas are nice and calm, even if it is snowing and blowing a gale – the crossing from Antarctica to South America however is a totally different story, with last night being very interesting rolling and pitching over to 23 degrees during my watch and even more randomly throughout the early hours of the morning.

I am also leaving Minerva in 10 days, to fly home just before Christmas so I will post some photos some time after that.

The ‘Crossing the line’ ceremony was yesterday afternoon and I ended up covered in random food stuffs and in the pool… pictures will follow at some point on FaceBook.

Once we get to Brazil we will be heading south to Argentina and then off to Antarctica for the next couple of months. I am only doing 2 of the Antarctica cruises before I leave to fly home just before Christmas but it should be good fun.

Minerva is a considerably smaller ship than what I am used too, she’s only around 12,000 GT and carries a very small 350 passengers (less than 200 when in Antarctica) and only 150 officers, staff and crew.

There isn’t much else to say, I had a 3 day handover period in Istanbul, before she sailed for the Greek & Turkish Islands. I am on the 8-12 watch and this cruise have a small number of the arrivals and departures, but mainly she is either already in port, or at sea when I come onto the bridge.

Coming from far larger ships, I was at first surprised to find that you can actually adjust the speed without the engines throwing a fit and de-clutching if you so much as looked at the CPP controls. You can also do reasonably large turns without the fear of listing the ship over and knocking everything flying.

Anyway, that is all there really is to say, I will at some point take some pictures, though I probably wont upload anything until I am home as the internet on this ship is not particularly good!