The waiting game

With not much to do now, other than pack bags and have a going away party, all the stresses and strains of the past couple of months seemed to have been whisped away. I'm sure they will return tho as we still have to get Charlie through customs when we arrive in Baltimore. But for now my mind has started to wander a bit... We have a container on a ship called MSC Christina, operateed by the Mediterranean Shipping Company... What can I find out about that vessel? So armed with the internet I get to work! Anybody who is bored by ships should probably switch off now!!

I initailly used the google image search thingy and turned up a multitude of pictures of people called Christina! Amazingly enough (for me, anyway), google-ing the vessels name turned up a couple of photos from http://www.shipspotting.com/. The Shipspotting website is the nautical equivelent of train spotting. You may mock this sort of stuff, but it can be amazingly useful when you want information. Anyway, thanks to Stan Muller in the Netherlands, I now have 2 photos of the vessel carrying Charlie Camel. And judging by the time they were taken, I'd even go as far as saying that our container is in those pictures somewhere! How cool is that! I would have sent him an email, but his profile on the shipspotting website lacks any sort or contact details.

Having a quick scout around on the MSC website I found out she was built in 1998 and has a gross tonnage of 37,579. I have no idea if thats a lot for a container ship, but I'd guess it would hurt if it ran over your foot!

Rather worryingly, I also stumbled accross this little snippet... It appears that MSC Christina was involved in a fender-bender in May 2005! I hope she has a better driver now!