We’re in the Suez Canal, second ship in a convoy heading south. We anchored at Port Said last night and weighed anchor at 3:30am to start the trip. The ship immediately behind us is one of the largest container ships in the world. It’s 400 meters long and carrying 19,200 twenty foot containers – wowza! Conditions are very calm at the moment but I can imagine transiting in the narrow canal would be very challenging in high winds.
We’ve seen many different kinds of security towers, at least we think they are security towers and many military facilities. There was also a memorial to Egyptian soldiers who died in the 7 day war with Israel – it is huge AK47! We evenhad fog for about 30 minutes.
We’ve had several different pilots on board and up to 3 tug boats following our ship most of the time. It was interesting to watch the switching of pilots, the small pilot boat would come to the side of the ship and crew would climb a rope ladder up or down. Meanwhile both QM2 and the pilot boat would be moving, although I’m pretty sure we slowed down a bit from our 8 knots.
