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Sea Princess Returns San Francisco

Having watched the Sea Princess leaving San Fransisco 10 days ago we decided to do same as she arrived back. The map below is taken form the marinetraffic.com web site which shows the current position of commercial ships around the world. The Sea Princess is represented by the blue arrow pointing towards the Golden Gate bridge.

The next picture in the sequence is taken from the ships Bridge WebCam and you can just see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.


Getting closer and the bridges south tower is clearly seen and also a freight carries just inside the bay.

Now just about the pass under the bridge.

Now we shift angles to the Fishermans Warf Web Cam. Here you can see the Sea Princess passing along the bay towards her birth.

Closer view from Fishermans Warf!

Even closer still!!!! Can you see the Smiths waving from the top deck????

And finally we see the view from the ships Bridge Cam. The ship will lye here for a few hours, swap of its passengers and then set sail on its next voyage!


The end of a memorable holiday I am sure! Perhaps we can get the Smith family to add a comment here.

Sea Princess departs San Francisco

As the Sea Princess set sail it was possible, from our home in Kemnay, to watch each stage of the departure from the comfort of our armchair. The first photo shows her well on her way to the Golden Gate bridge. It was a bit hazy which is not that uncommon at San Francisco bay.

As she sailed on, a cargo ship was entering the bay under the bridge – you can see the stem of that ship in the next picture – the Sea Princess was giving this ship a wide berth.


Of course, at this stage the pilot would have been in control of the ship. I think that the small craft below is the San Francisco bay pilot boat. Quite a nice view with the north pillar of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

About the same time the Sea Princess was on a direct course heading towards the bridge. Below, we can see the view from the Bridge Web Cam onboard the ship – this web cam is not quite such good resolution but we can clearly see the bridge and another ship in view.

Whilst we watched the Web Cams we also had a browser open and were tracking the course of the various ships using the Marine Traffic web site. This site shows, super-imposed on the Google Maps views the locations, direction of travel and speed of all ships in the area. If you are interested you can view this at the following URL http://marinetraffic.com/ais/. In the picture below which was a section of the Marine traffic view at the time the blue icon is the Sea Princes, the green icon is the Pilot boat and you can also see another ship entering the bay under the bridge.

Now we see the Sea Princess as she passes under the bridge with the Pilot boat in the foreground.
If you want see the current view from the Wharf 39 Web Cam click here.
It is really amazing what you can achieve using various elements of technology as I hope this example above demonstrates.

The Smiths leave SanFrancisco

My three nieces and sister in law and brother in law are on holiday at the moment. They spent the first few days in San Fransisco and then are cruising up to Alaska…. Fantastic to be sure! The Ship set sail last night at midnight. What I will do in these next posts is to document their departure using live pictures taken from Web Cams on the ship and at San Fransisco harbour. The first picture below was taken from the live web cam which is located at Wharf 39 where it is normally used for viewing the steals which hang out there!!!! If you look carefully you will be able to see the Smith family standing on the top deck just under the ships funnel…. I think that you can tell that they are all waving their arms in the air!!!!!

San Francisco – last post


Today I am heading back home to good old bonnies Scotland. This has been a relatively long trip so I am thinking long to get home again ( thinking about a song which reminds me of home – The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen…….. lyrics availble click here).

Yesterday, I travelled from San Francisco to San Jose to participate in an Executive Briefing event. This is where some key decision makers from a company or organisation travel to Cisco’s Exective Briefing Center in San Jose to listen to some presentations about new technology developments.

I was one of four presenters and this is the first time I have done an event like this at Cisco’s main Headquarters. Cisco occupies a number of buildings which are spread along Tasmin Drive. We travelled there to arrive in time for breakfast and also to transport our customers so it was a relatively early start ( we needed to be in San Jose for 7.30am to have breakfast).

The photo above shows the sun rising just as we left San Francisco having passed under the Bay Bridge.

This has been a long but enjoyable trip – I will look forward my next trip when I hope to manage my time to make it possible to do two things which were not possible between business commitments this time around – ride on a San Francisco Tram and also visit Alcatraz. The later was my objective this time – but it seems that you need to book that a few days in advance which made it impossible this time around.

At the moment I am spending some time at San Francisco International airport waiting for my flight departure time. Oh the joys of international travel 😉

Some more pictures from San Francisco

I was able to spend some time in the tourist area of San Francisco – Pier 39 at Fishermans Warf etc. This was an interesting day – first time that I have had the chance to see this part of San Francisco. We walked in and around Pier 39 and visited the Aquarium.

We then discovered that there is a World War II American Submarine called the USS Pampanito which we could board and view which we did – this really very interesting – click here for more information about the sub and the Maritime Museum in general. To see how the sailors had to live and work in very confined conditions was really interesting. We then went on to board a Liberty Ship which is actually still operational and does occasional cruses etc. It has a steam powered Tripple Expansion engine which we were able to see a close range – absolutely amazing to see this feat of engineering and appreciate its scale etc…
You can read more about the Liberty ship S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien – click here

I did take a few photos as you might expect which can be viewed by clicking here

This was a very enjoyable day in the company of my friend and colleague Jochen.