Into the Dry as in VERY DRY DOCK

We had a few fun days in Tenerife and while most people were busy visiting a fast food chain with a golden arch and terrible, crappy and expensive food, we went out to a local restaurant and had Tapas, Paella, Sangria and other great local dishes and drinks. :)

This week was also set aside to lighten the ship before we go into dry dock. For the first time ever we saw this note on the Captain's notice board: USE MORE WATER! Waaaaa-hoooooo! No more 2 min showers! :)

Landrovers, containers, even life rafts and anything that's "heavy but not screwed on" was removed so that we can sail over to Gran Canaria for the actual dock yard work. The wake up call came at 3.30am and by 5am we were on our way. As you can see we had some nice big waves between the 2 islands:

Leaving Tenerife at 5am

Here are some more shots as we were getting close to the harbour:

Darren was working on the Satellite dish as we were sailing.

Now you can see how many M-SC containers are in each port :)

Big boat vs. little boat. Size DOES matter! :)

The ship needs to sail towards that tiny concrete bay, then be turned around by 3 tug boats so that we would back into that special berth. 2 smaller boats came with the massive mooring lines and quite literraly they pulled us in.

Once we were deep into that bay, the little tug boats manuevered out and pushed us all the way in. Then the fun part for us, spectaculars stopped for a while as the divers took over. They had to go under to ensure the ship is coming in straight and will lie on the proper blocks. We had lunch and what we noticed was that our ship started to rise. A few hours later the wooden platform we were sitting on came all the way up. Lazy seagulls showed up right away to snatch the tiny fish and other sea creatures that were caught up in our platform-rise.

Water height when we pulled in.

Water height 0 as the platform rose.

We went outside again only to notice 3 yellow TRACTORS to come close. We didn't see much of what was happening right under us, but the captain said that they were attaching some ropes with the intention of actually PULLING THE SHIP! A 16.000 tons ship!!! Ok, we were on wheels, but still. They kept on trying without much luck so eventually a fourth tractor was called and amazingly, they were able to make the ship move! We had to stop a few times, but soon enough we made it all the way to the end of the dock yard.

That's all we could see from the top looking down. 3 tractors making us move.
HOW COOL IS THAT???

Here is one picture of the ship in dry dock. How is life in dry dock and how the ship looks like from the bottom up? Well, that's in the next post :)

Both Darren and I were taking pictures and making videos from deck 8 as we were coming into dry dock and we managed to work together for the first time to produce this clip: