Departure from Cape Town was delayed by two days, the first thing you realise that ships are not like aeroplanes, the schedule is a "best case" scenario, rather than a definite time frame. Anyhow, we finally got underway at 0800 Thursday, just in time to catch the tail end of a 4m swell which will make the next few days interesting…
Our home for the (hopefully only) seven days is the MV Baltic Trader, a 250 tonne coaster/passenger carrier that does the regular Cape Town-Tristan da Cunha run to deliver goods, passengers and other essentials that you can't get on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, she returns to Cape Town laden with lobster from the Tristan fishing concession. She is rather a pig of a boat (flat bottomed, empty holds and 50 tonnes of deck cargo), she rolls terribly even in the flattest of millponds. As I write this, we've hardly left Table Bay and she is rolling through a 40° arc. The remaining seven days are going to be rather unpleasant if it doesn't calm down.
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