Some of the ShipWatcher features weren’t working when you viewed the site using the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE8), so I’ve fixed those problems.
Basically if you held your mouse over a webcam image, you were supposed to then see information about the ship. This didn’t work in IE8. While I was testing this, I found out it wasn’t working properly when you used the Firefox brower either.
ShipWatcher should work fine with these browsers now. If it doesn’t, please let me know.
I’ve also applied these fixes to VQE2.COM – the Virtual QE2 webcam site.
Two postcards I came across this week which highlight how ocean travel has changed over 70 years.
Tegelberg: (Info from Ronald Turner’s web page) Dutch passenger ship Built at Nederlandscae Sb hij in 1938 Capacity: 640 passengers. GRT: 14140, Length: 170.5 metres, Width: 22 metres, Speed: 17/18 knots Converted to a Troopship and chartered for the Ministry of War, Liverpool, in 1942, capable of housing 2681 troops. Broken up at Kaohsiung in 1968 after 30 years of service.
Dawn Princess: (Info from Wikipedia) Built by Fincatieri, in Italy in 1996. Capacity: 1950 passengers, 900 crew. GRT: 77,500 Length: 261m Width 32m Speed: 21 knots
My father travelled on Tegelberg between India and the UK in 1945. He tells me he remembers being aboard the ship, and how all the children were told to stay below decks at one point during the voyage while they buried a recently deceased Italian prisoner of war at sea.
Despite having 1/5 the GRT of a modern day cruise ship like Dawn Princess, Tegelberg was required to carry over 2,000 crew during her war service. One can only imagine how crowded that must have been.
Ship Dawn Princess is currently receiving maintenance at a drydock on the Brisbane River.
Brisbane is beautiful in winter, so I thought I’d record and upload a timelapse video from her webcam of a day on the Brisbane River, from sunrise to sunset.
The view is across the river from the cruise terminal where most ships berth. You can see the CityCat ferries zipping across the water all day, taking passengers into the city, and traffic moving up and down the river.
I hope you enjoy it. And if you’re looking for a pleasant, relaxing place to visit during June, you can’t go past Brisbane!
I’ve been watching Coral Princess over the last few days as she tours Alaska.
Her webcam has been sending back some amazing shots of this beautiful part of the world.
If you’d like to look through the webcam archives, just go to http://ShipWatcher.com/Photos and browse away. If there’s a specific ship you’re interested in, just select it from the dropdown.
If you find any you like, please let me know and I’ll let everyone else know about them!
A postcard I sent home to Liz and the kids during my cruise between Sydney and Auckland.
The purser very kindly stamped it with the big black ship stamp before I posted it.
Unfortunately Aurora had problems with a thruster bearing during that leg of the voyage, so we missed a few ports, but it was still very enjoyable.
Built in 2000 for P&O, Aurora is 270m long, and over 76,000 GRT. She normally cruises at about 24 knots and usually does one circumnavigation in Feb / March each year.
A postcard from Wendy, who works on Cunard’s flagship RMS Queen Mary 2. This postcard was sent recently while she was crossing the North Atlantic from Southampton to New York.
Thanks Wendy!
Queen Mary 2 was launched in 2003.
She has a length of 345m (1,132 feet) and a tonnage of 148,528 GRT. With a displacement of about 76,000 tonnes, she is the heaviest passenger ship in the world, eclipsing RCI’s Freedom of the Seas, which although having a higher tonnage, only displaces 64,000 tonnes.
QM2 cruises at about 30 knots, making her the fastest ocean liner on the seas today.
She’s too wide (41m / 135 feet) to pass through the Panama Canal, which means that during circumnavigations she must sail around Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America.
