Underway

 Underway

I spent Friday at Belfast's newly created Titanic Quarter, once the center of shipbuilding in the city. Today, the area that was desolate six years ago when I last visited, has been transformed into a vibrant entertainment and living district
centered around the ultra modern Titanic Museum. The building is at the location of the defunct Harland and Wolf shipyard where the Titanic was built. It is surrounded by the refurbished remnants of the shipbuilding industry including two gigantic
cranes named Samson and Goliath that are today only occasionally used to assemble windmills to power Europe. The museum is a state-of-the-art facility that concentrates on the history of Belfast shipbuilding, particularly the building of the
Titanic.  While it doesn't gloss over the sinking, it minimizes it.  After all, the unofficial motto of Belfast is "she was floating when she left here". To burn off the rest of my English money, I went back to the central city and took in a movie
in a beautiful, modern multiplex cinema equal to any at home.  I returned to the ship by curfew, saying goodbye to a great city and resting up for departure and work.

We shoved off about 09:00 on Sunday, mooring for training at the mouth of Belfast harbor until about 19:00.  We are now underway, heading south through the Irish Sea to the Mediterranean and our next port
of Split, Croatia.

Rich Delbango
Ship's Librarian

We arrived in Belfast, Northen Ireland after midnight on Thursday and didn't get to the ship until about 1:30 AM. Exhausted, we all settled in, got some food and hit our bunks. Unfortunately, my cabin is a little less luxurious this year, located on a lower and noisier deck. To make matters worse, most of the cabins on my deck got flooded on Thursday afternoon due to a plumbing problem. Thank God all of my posessions were off the floor. Some others were not so lucky. Everything got cleaned up while I went into town for the day. Most of Thursday was spent getting acclimated to the ship and trying to traack down the keys to the Library. I finally found them on Friday and got to check things out a bit. The Library will be opening on Sunday evening after we get underway. On Friday, I and about 20 cadets took a tour of the northern coast on which we visited the Giant's Causeway and the Carrick a Reid rope bridge. New for this year were stops at locations used in the TV show Game of Thrones. Despite rain all day, we had a great time. Today, after some shopping in town, I'm touring the Titanic museum located on the next pier from our ship. This newly built complex really enhances the dock area that was so run down on my last visit here 6 years ago. Many of the cadets have already been there and loved it. On Sunday we cast off at high tide sometime late morning heading for Croatia.

For the fourth time I will be heading out to sea for the summer as the Ship's Librarian for the SUNY Maritime College's Summer Sea Term. I will be working on board the training ship Empire State VI and sailing the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Atlantic from June 24 to August 10. Ports include Belfast, Northern Ireland, Split Croatia and Cadiz, Spain. Follow my journey here. I will be posting pics here as well when I'm in port. I can be reached by email at Richard.Delbango@ts-empirestate.com

Disclaimer

This blog documents my travels working on the Training Ship Empire State VI for the State University of New York Maritime College. The comments and views expressed here are solely my own and do not reflect anything to do with the Maritime College.