Skip to main content

How We Get Ashore

By the standards of most cruise lines the Fram is a small ship. Even among the Hurtigruten fleet it is a relative lightweight, carrying a maximum of 240 passengers compared to the nearly 500 the larger coastal boats can accommodate.

But that doesn't make it any easier to get to shore at the towns and villages we have so far visited. Even with its relatively shallow draft it is unable to dock by at the quay. So passengers must be tendered ashore on the Fram's little fleet of Polar Cirkel tender craft. Similar to Zodiacs, but easier to get in and out of, the Fram has about a half dozen seven-passenger versions and two 11-seaters. They speed us from ship to shore and back.

The Fram's crew makes sure we enter and exit safety, as we employ the "sailor's grip": your hand grasps the sailor's wrist, and vice versa, as we enter and exit.

The second photo shows the two versions at the tender deck which lowers from the side the Fram. With winches and pulleys it only takes a few minutes for the crew to put a Polar Cirkel boat in the water. With only half its full complement of passengers aboard, the tendering operation has been going smoothly and without many hitches.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Newport: Memory of Childhood

To most the city of Newport, Rhode Island, is associated with the Gilded Age mansions lining Ocean Avenue and the Cliff Walk. For me it's the Awful Awful. The Awful Awful is a thick milkshake, but instead of being made from ice cream, milk and syrup, most of its dairy content comes from ice milk. It originated at Bond's, a northern New Jersey ice cream chain with an outpost in my home town, Elizabeth. It got it's name because it's "Awful Big, Awful Good". Drink three and get your name inscribed on the wall, plus a fourth for free. Two ice cream chains in New England took notice of the thick shake and bought rights to market it under the Awful Awful name anywhere but in Bond's home territory of the Garden State. But when one of them starting expanding, not being able to enter the New Jersey market was a major impediment, so they changed the name to Fribble. That's what the chain -- Friendly's -- continues to call its shake, though it...
Post a Comment
Read more

Photographer at Sea

Everyone on board has a camera, of course. Including the two professionals aboard: Camille, the in-house photographer who offers tips and provides her photos at the end of the journey (for a price, of course), and Dan, part of a contingent of travel journalists aboard this repositioning cruise, accompanied by Hurtigruten's global PR manager, Øystein Knoph. But the photographer pictured here is no professional. He's a weight-lifter, based on the amount of heavy glass in that lens. He was trying to catch photos of trailing birds this morning on the Labrador Sea. I seriously doubt he could hold the camera steady enough (no tripod) to get a decent snap. I am reminded by this scene of the old saw about the inverse ratio between the size of a photographers lens and his... As for me, I'm relying on my iPhone 7's camera and my lightweight, compact Canon G-9, which has served me well for the past eight years. I considered bringing one of my old 35mm film cameras with lense...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salem: Great Knockers

Forget the witches or the House of the Seven Gables when visiting Salem, Massachusetts. Instead, see a great set of knockers, and a whole lot of whimsical metalwork, at Herb Mackey's Metal Sculpture Yard, the last house on  Blaney Street aside the parking lot for the Salem-Boston Ferry. It's free, and I'm told the whimsical welder who created the metal creatures will come out to chat when he's home. On Saturday, after spending a delightful time over a lingering lunch with my cousins Susan and Rita, who took the train to Salem from their Cambridge homes, I took a slow stroll through downtown Salem, maneuvering among the witches, warlocks and hanger-ons who descend upon this historic maritime hub to commemorate a nasty period in American colonial history, the Salem witch trials.  The hordes made the Halloween crowds who descend on my neighborhood for Eastern State Penitentiary's annual scare show seem puny. Salem's most notable cultural attraction is ...
Post a Comment
Read more