Month: November 2014

We went out for a Pizza last night and then drove around to the Island to try and get a shot of HMS Quorn. This was the best that I could do.

As mentioned in the previous post, I took lots of static images as well as the video. So here goes! Find the big yawn – one sailor wasn’t impressed:-)

 

 

 

Lastly, if you look carefully through the glass you will see the guard of honour waiting for its arrival. Without being there, I would guess that it is the Ipswich British Legion. You can also see the all important Skip (or Dumpster to my US friends) waiting for what the Royal Navy calls “Gash” which it can no
longer dump at sea!

It was a big day today. HMS Quorn (named after the Quorn Hunt – not the veggie food!) arrived in Ipswich. She has a long affiliation with Ipswich and, as I understand, she will be here for 5 days. Seeing Suntis come and go through the lock every other week has made us familiar with the technique but we aren’t talking about a “bog standard” freighter here. We are talking about a multi-million pound warship that, should it hit the sides of the dock, will result in a court marshall for the captain! Hence, we have two tugs and a 10 minute procedure.

I took lots of photos and two videos. The first one is 10 minutes long and is the whole trip through the lock. I have trimmed this down to 2 1/2 minutes showing the end bit.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0iTFwJIZ8Q]
The next video shows it negotiation the Wet Dock. The sounds you can hear in both videos are the commands being given on the bridge. They relayed these on a loudspeaker.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF8sOEfujA8]
Lastly, I took the whole 10 minutes and ran it through iMovie at 8x speed!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRDfMX9PBhQ]

The tweeting of the birds is the sound track speeded up as well as I forgot to remove it!

All three videos were taken on my Canon 700D on a tripod. I have learned and now I put the camera into manual focus mode otherwise you get to hear the sound of the lens focusing all the time.

I have lots of static images but I will post them in the next blog entry.

Woke up this morning to frost on all the hammerheads.

 

It was a very cold and still morning so I couldn’t resist taking the usual reflections photo

As mentioned, Suntis came in on the Sunday evening high today. They got going very early in their unloading using two cranes (unusually).

They worked very hard all day and by 16.40 they were all packed up and ready to leave. They couldn’t actually go until high tide again, which was around 1am this morning but this was an exceedingly fast turnaround. As my friend in Australia (who works for a shipping firm in Sydney) stated in a comment a while ago (October 30th) – “Someone would be in hot water-vessel principals continually push!!!!!”

Wet, cold and miserable. At last, something like a real November day. There have been a few yachts coming and going plus the Allen Gardiner has been on the move. Later today, though, HMC Searcher came in to the Wet Dock. It is always nice to get a visit from the Border Force.

This week is Suntis week, having had a break for about four weeks. I guess that they don’t sell so much wood in the winter! She arrived around 1pm and will come through the lock around midnight tonight ready for the off early tomorrow morning. Firstly, you can see the edited image.

Then,  this shot, taken through the hobby room window, shows how bad the weather is this afternoon.

The Red 7 Marine mono-hull Jack Up Barge – Haven Seaway – has been with us for quite some time. This morning, we saw two large tugs arrive and start to manoeuvre into place. Eventually, the started to move and off the barge went. It will be strange not to see those large legs looming over the yard. I am sorry about the quality but my daughter has borrowed my Canon camera so this was taken with my iPad!

For those of you overseas, here in the Uk we remember our military loss on the nearest Sunday to 11th November – the 1st World War having ended at 11am on 11th November 1918. There is always a big parade at the Cenotaph in Whitehall but every town has its own small parade centred around their war memorial.

Ipswich’s parade normally includes a contingent from the Army Air Corps (AAC) that is based at RAF Wattisham. We didn’t get down to the Ipswich parade but were watching the parade in Whitehall on the TV. Just at 11am when we all observe 2 minutes silence, there was the sound of military helicopters over the Wet Dock. It was two AAC Apache helicopters on their way to a fly past over the Ipswich parade.

Apaches are notoriously difficult to photograph. We used to live in Tuddenham St. Martin and the AAC use that village as a turning point on their regular trips to and from their practice range at Woodbridge so I have lots of experience at photographing low flying Apaches. However, they are painted in a very matt dark green drab which is totally non reflective so, unless the are flying in direct sunlight, you can barely make out any details. Anyway, here are two shots that I managed to take. One against the blue sky.

 

One against a cloudy background.

Just to show you how little there is to see, this is a large blow up of one Apache.

 

We had a new sailing ship come in on Sunday. It was the Jean de la Lune. This is an ex-French brigantine fishing boat that has been converted to a pleasure craft. I got a couple of shots on Sunday but it was a very grey day. Today was nice and sunny and they had opened up some of the sails.

According to its schedule, it should be in the Canary Island but as at 12pm today, it was still in Ipswich. However, when I came back in at around 4pm, it was gone, I presume it is off to sunnier climes for the winter. For more details about the ship, check out the Sailing Dreams website.

I have shown you images before of the Red 7 Marine mono-hull Jack Up Barge – Haven Seaway – but we haven’t seen it “jacked up” before. There is a company down from us that refurbishes these things. Normally, they just sit there and you just see them get a little brighter before they are taken away.

This time, they have “jacked” it up so I took the opportunity of taking a photo.The first was taken on Thursday.

The second one, taken on Friday, shows it along with the crane with cage full of personnel coming down. I missed them going up – but then I can’t spend all day watching! (It’s a pity that it lines up exactly with the electricity pylon behind but then I can’t change my position much!) For more information on the barge check out the Red7 web site. It is a PDF but I can’t find a pure web page.