We 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 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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