Our British Columbia and Alaska scuba diving adventures are among my favourite trips of the year and I am anxious to get going. We were up very late last night and all the staff made one heckuva an effort to wrap this year’s intensive and extensive refit and overhaul in time to board our guests at noon.
Read MoreWe have been incredibly busy over the last 3 weeks with Part 1 of our 2008 shipyard refit. My apologies for not getting a Captain’s Log report out before this. The Nautilus Explorer was built in a Canadian shipyard to our custom specifications and launched in May 2000. The ship is under rigorous annual inspection requirements by Transport Canada as an ISM SOLAS Home Trade 1 passenger vessel and undergoes an even more detailed quadrennial inspection every 4 years.
Read MoreWe are at sea today enroute from Cabo San Lucas/San Jose del Cabo to San Benedicto Island with the roughest weather we have seen this season. There was a big honking storm with humongous seas off the Oregon/California coast a couple of days ago and we are getting the residual wave train of 7 to 8 feet on a fairly long period. The ride on the good ‘ol Nautilus Explorer isn’t bad but we are getting the occasional haystack where the energy of waves from different directions converges and literally piles up into a column of water, as well as potholes where the opposite happens and you get a deep trough.
Read MoreI often get asked why we don’t offer more night diving at Socorro and San Benedicto Islands (Islas Revillagigedos). Quite frankly, the ever-present silky sharks become overly inquisitive once the sun goes down and switch over into “hunting mode.” Still, I always try to offer at least one snorkelling opportunity after dark.
Read MoreWell, today is Day 3 of our annual shipyard refit. We choose to drydock the Nautilus Explorer every spring to spruce things up and continue our quest for continuous improvement. Actually, drydock isn’t quite accurate as that refers to a floating dock that is submerged to the point where a ship can be positioned over the main deck and then the dock’s ballast tanks are pumped out, lifting the ship out of the water. To be technically precise, the Nautilus was slipped on a synchrolift – which is a network of railway tracks with bogies that are towed onto a submersible platform that is then lowered into the water by 16 precisely synchronized electric hoists with the ship then positioned on top of the bogies and the platform then lifted out of the water. The synchrolift that we use at Gran Peninsula shipyard in Ensenada is capable of lifting a 300ft ship! So a 325-ton ship like the Nautilus Explorer is just a little job for them.
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