Shipping news

Around 13:00 today, sitting in a shelter near Yaverland Beach, we saw a large passenger ship heading in from the east, presumably a cruise ship heading for Southampton. It was just about high tide so that seemed about right.

Back at the cottage a little later it seemed a good idea to try and find out which one it was - using Bing supported by the various websites which offer information about this sort of thing.

There appeared to be two candidates, the 'Arcadia' and the 'Silver Shadow'. There was also talk of a custom whereby cruise ships arrived first thing in the morning and left late afternoon - but that could be discounted as tides would sometimes get in the way and sometimes there would be changes to the schedule.

Further evidence. Perhaps the 'Silver Shadow' could now be ruled out as it had arrived at the wrong time.

On the other hand the Arcadia had arrived from Wales. Which could be explained by saying that all large ships came in and left by the eastern channel, the western channel being too narrow, too shallow.

In any event by the end of the afternoon it was out again, heading for Alicante. Suggesting a very quick turnaround.

A turnaround which was a bit more than a few passengers getting on and off. It was the end of one cruise and the beginning of another. All a bit fishy.

Turning back to the 'Silver Shadow'. Also back at sea and heading for Cornwall.

And on its way to Iceland. Give or take a few typos in the reported detail. Perhaps if you want quality information you have to pay to get off the free tier - with it being suggested several times that this was what I should have been doing.

At this point, I was getting into rather a muddle and thought that I had better ask Bard. Once again, quite good on the general idea, but fairly hopeless on the details. Telling me, for example, in almost the same breath that there were no ferries arriving between 11:00 and 14:00 and that one did arrive at 12:00. 

It was also quite happy to reroute Brittany Ferries from Portsmouth to Southampton. Perhaps the fact that I was asking about Southampton was evidence for it that there were ships arriving there and it was doing the best it could to find one?

But to be fair, if I was having trouble collating all the various websites in a satisfactory way, what chance did it have?

Aside, one might suppose that all the screen shots above are powered by some all-powerful, central database which knows everything there is to know about shipping, containing, inter alia, objects (aka entities), properties (aka attributes) and relations between them. With ships and ports being able to function as both objects with properties and as properties of other objects. With just a few glitches in keeping that database up to date and projecting its contents into the outside world. Little local timing difficulties and that sort of thing. So when one asks Bard about ships and ports, can one put one's finger on anything vaguely comparable? Does Bard know about objects at all? Does it materialise objects on a temporary basis, for the purposes of the current conversation? I don't suppose that I will ever know.

Then does it have any knowledge of, understanding of partial orders on objects, claimed by some to be the root of all knowledge, of everything? This from a smattering of category theory, another hare which I have been chasing.

At this point I decided to look at the Brittany Ferry website at reference 4. Maybe I had jumped to conclusions, and in the absence of the monocular, left behind on this occasion, I had assumed that the ship in question was a cruise liner and assumed that it was heading for Southampton, forgetting that Portsmouth was hidden by Culver Point. We were at Sandown, not Ryde, from which last the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour is clearly visible.

So the current bet is a Brittany Ferry headed into Portsmouth.

And while, on the face of it, Bard made a bit of a mess of sorting out all the data out there, it did, in a roundabout way, give me a push in the right direction. It did earn its keep. And the new feature whereby one can store and revisit conversations is looking good.

A second puzzle

I then started to wonder whether Brittany Ferries was indeed French. I had previously thought so, but looking at their website at reference 4, I was no longer so sure. Which took me to the corporate site at reference 5, from which I learn that they are indeed French and that they started out in the early 1970's shipping vegetables across to England. A trade which crops up in the dying days of sail in Simenon.

Clearly another question for Bard, which doesn't do badly, going so far as to offer a list of the various French agricultural interests which own all the shares. But it missed the fact that an outfit called CMA CGM, a big French shipping operator, has taken a 12% share and it needed a direct prompt before it took that one on board. Giving the impression that it had prior knowledge of CMA CGM and its shareholding in Brittany Ferries, but was not able to join things up on the fly.

Which takes me neatly back to reference 1.

PS 1: I have also learned that, should we want to go to Canada again and didn't fancy flying, we could go by boat. Takes a little while, but maybe I could cope with that. Maybe BH would actually like it. Bit dear though.

PS 2: also that all Brittany Ferries proudly fly the French flag. I don't think all our ferry operators can make a comparable claim - vaguely recalling a row about foreign owners doing something bad with what looked like UK ferries a few years back. I restrain the urge to check.

PS 3: Saturday morning: readers will be pleased to learn that Tornike Tordia, my Silversea Personal Cruise Consultant is now on the case. Ready and waiting for any queries which I might have - or purchases which I might want to make.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/big-boat.html. I think I did rather better on this one.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Arcadia_(2004).

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Shadow_(ship). A much smaller affair, maybe not so much bigger than a Brittany ferry.

Reference 4: https://www.brittany-ferries.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://corporate.brittany-ferries.com/.

Reference 6: https://www.cma-cgm.com/.