Dry Dock in Las Palmas, Spain

The five day sail from Monrovia to Las Palmas was smooth, and my first ocean voyage.
Crusing speed was about 11 knots, and fuel consumption was 8.2k liters a day.

For the first 3 days out of Monrovia there was a pirate ship watch during the night time. Old co-workers, friends and family, thanks for the warnings, no pirates were incountered!

After waiting a few days in a passenger berth, our slot in the shipyard was open. On this windy day, tug boats aided the ship to back into the lift dock.

The aft lines you see are ties to a rack on each side. This rack pulled the ship in slowly.

Lift dock control room, there were 30 lift winches on each side. Divers moved the trolleys and wood planks to support the ship.

Bow thrusters

Underway these screws turn at ~175 RPM, constant. The speed of the ship depends on the pitch of the blades. About 5 degrees equals about 11 knots.

Four front loaders were chained together and pulled the ship off the lifting dock, to it's shipyard berth. The engineering superintendent remarked that a former rail ferry ship is now rolling on rails.

Yes, that is a rudder on the front of the ship. I was told that when the ship was a train ferry, the route that it had it would not turn around, as it also had doors in the bow and aft. The trains would drive through the ship. Which means the ship sailed in reverse. There was a second bridge on the back of the ship. The seams of door on the bow are visible up close. The seam runs vertically between the F and R of Africa, then slants down toward flat horizontal part of the mid bow. The location of the supporting hull trolleys changes at each paint job (every few years). This ensures the sections that can't be painted now, will be the next.

One task in dry dock is to clean and paint the hull, all blue and reddish. Fortunately the many anodes on the ship were still there, only a few needed replacement. What does the zinc do? Click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrificial_anode When the older Mercy ship Anastasis was dry docked all the zinc anodes had been removed by diving thieves.

The shipyard is a busy, dusty, and noise place. It's a seven to seven in the evening operation, marked by the sirens, air raid sirens. They tell you when it's lunch time and siesta time. There's constant loud sandblasting, welding, painting, and pressure washing. There are cranes milling about too, helping remove corroded pipes, burned up electrical motors, engine parts - you name it. Our on-board crane's cables are too short to lower items to the ground. The other day it was discovered that one of the propeller blades has a crack. The inspector decided that it would have to be replaced. We're now waiting to see if the one spare blade (for port side, they are handed) weighs within 2-1kg of the old, so that the propeller assembly will be properly balanced. Each blade is 2 metric tons.