With the wind set to build we had no worries about that at least, Scott was most likely going to be hanging on for dear life, but we could not take any chances with a smaller rig especially if he made any mistakes in the boat’s path and the wind suddenly died! Rigged and ready we waited on Cowes parade once again. When the ship finally started to appear through the trees along Southampton Water my initial reaction was something along the lines of “Oh Jesus Christ look at the size of that!” Or words to that effect! Laden with thousands of brightly coloured containers, this enormous black beauty was slowly creeping out of Southampton Water towards us bathed in the morning sunlight. Scott duly blasted out into the ruffled waters of the Solent on a direct line towards the hull of this ridiculous craft. Like a man on a mission Gardner was pushing to sail as close as possible but was spotted by the harbour master who was clearing the way and forced him to take a wide birth right on the turn. Just shy of four football pitches in length, once Lil had turned and was racing up the Solent parallel to the shoreline, there was no way I could fit her in the frame of my camera using my big lens. With Scott’s tiny sail blasting down the side, it was a truly awesome comparison of scale between the windsurfing rig and the 140,000-tonne super container. As this giant ship disappeared down the Solent at least we scooped another batch of shots and our jigsaw was almost completed. We were starting to find a groove with capturing these big ships and our confidence was rising. This time round two café lattes were required to wash down a huge slice of carrot cake doused in cream for our ‘Shanghai Lil’ debrief as we celebrated our conquest.
THE RUBY PRINCESS
I kind of fancied catching a massive white cruise ship to complete the set of shots and with a decent forecast and Carnival’s Ruby Princess set to sail on the Monday after the IOW pop festival we decided to have one last stab at capturing our prey. With a kind of mushy onshore wind and dreary skies, we were at our usual spot and went through the motions but despite having over 1200 crew on board, nineteen decks, 1500 guest rooms and measuring in at over 1000 feet long, this ‘booty’ just wasn’t ticking the boxes for me when compared to the Shanghai Lil.
As we were packing up, I was kind of feeling down in the doldrums, so decided to do one last check on the Southampton Port website. Scanning down the ‘size of ship’ column I suddenly had to take a deep breath as my heart momentarily stopped when I spotted 396m length monster in the list. “Shiver me timbers” I exclaimed to Scott. “The bloody Polo is due in port in two days’ time, she’s on her way up as we speak, en-route from Tangiers” It was this moment that I realized I was in the midst of a strange addiction with these ships. Had I become a serial ship spotter? Oh blimey!