Day Sixteen

English Channel to Rotterdam

Shortly after breakfast we arrive in Felixstowe. This port certainly is very safety-aware. For one, you have to wear an orange vest when leaving the ship (the Captain is kind enough to borrow me his, unfortunately it doesn't say "Capitan" in big letters) and, anyways, no walking around. You are to be picked up by a shuttle bus and brought to the Seafarer's Home where you can leave the port. This bus only starts operating at ten. Ten English time, this is. On board we keep to CET, which makes it eleven.

At the Seafarer's Home I enquire into how to get to town. For once, I am not looked at strangely when asking how far it would be to walk. Instead, the lady suggest that it would a very nice walk of thirty minutes.

Felixstowe is a typical small English town. It has some sort of Spa with plenty of restaurants along the sea side. My destination, though, is to a bank. I foolishly had withdrawn some pounds from an ATM in Gibraltar. Turns out, they have their own flavour of the Pound which is not accepted in England. This is also news to the lady at the bank counter. She first tries to exchange them as if they where foreign money but later, after the computer wouldn't have any of that, just swappes them for English notes.

Back at the port the scheduled departure time of three o'clock comes and goes. At three thirty they finally have cleared all the containers. Despite all the machinery, they seem to be quite slow. At seven, only four hours late, we leave for our last short hop towards Holland.

As a kind of farewell, this part of the North Sea is rather rough. Only when we reach the Maas river it gets quite. We reach Rotterdam at five in the morning and the finally engine stops.