Spirit of Adventure blog

Sailing out of UK in January with beautiful weather. Not quite. For the past week, I had been closely monitoring the weather in order to plan and execute our passage from Southampton to Funchal. We departed from Pier 101 and made our way out. Our pilot Darcy, who I have known for a few years now, took over the Con of the ship once we passed the Dock head. With the weather front approaching, my plan was to speed up as much as we could once pass the Nab (warp drive, please), in order to be out of the Bay of Biscay when the weather front hit. The plan worked, as we passed the Cap Finisterre and turned south west ahead of schedule. Although the sea was rough, the swell was behind us and Adventure surfed nicely and the swell died down the following day.

Arrival at Funchal pilot station was set for 07:00 so I was quite surprised when my phone rang at 05:00 instead of 06:00. When I saw that the phone call was from the Chief Engineer… oh, boy…. Chris informed me we had lost one of our engines and that arrival would have to be completed on the reduced power of the bow thruster. The ship’s key systems are designed with ample redundancy to allow her to continue to operate safely in these circumstances, but as belt and braces I called the Bridge and told 2nd Officer Atanas to call port control and order a tug.

We boarded our pilot, made fast the tug and slowly made our approach to our assigned berth. The weather was nice with the wind behind us which helped me come alongside with minimum use of the engines. The tug was just following us, resting on our port shoulder. All in all our arrival was conducted, as always, safe and sound. Once alongside the gangway was rigged and our guests and crew went ashore. The engine team worked on repairing the engine and were, of course, successful.

Departure was in hands of my reliever, the new Saga Captain Colm Ryan, who will be taking over from me at the end of this cruise. He reversed my actions from this morning and once we were clear of the breakwater, swung the ship around to south, disembarked the pilot and started making way towards La Palma, our next port.

Kind Regards
Captain Franko Papić