January 14, 2023

I’ve been posting recently about the banded Black Skimmers at Mallory Square. There’s lots of other things along the square besides the Skimmers.

I happened to be there one day as they were docking a large cruise ship. I’ve been wondering how they tied up the ships along the pier. It took them 30 minutes to tie up the ship that morning. In addition to the crew on board, there are crews from the port working on both ends of the ship. To tie up a line, it takes three men on shore, there more in a boat, plus the men on board the ship. The crew in the boat grabs the line from the ship, takes it to shore, and the crew on land ties it up. The lines are then tightened from the ship.

I took a video of the procedure (about 4 minutes), and a few photos as well. I spoke with one of the men on shore. He said it usually goes a little faster than 30 minutes. A lot depends on the crew on board the ship.

After watching that, I will never complain about tying up our boat again. Our ropes look like dental floss compared to the cruise ship ropes! When we tie up our boat, Tim slowly moves the boat sideways to the dock. If we’re lucky, there’s a crew on shore and I can toss the ropes to them, and they tie us up. If no one is there, I must lasso the cleat on shore and tie up the lines on our boat. Once we are secure, Tim gets off the boat and makes sure the lines on shore are secure.

On another day, I met a passenger from a cruise ship as she was wandering around Mallory Square. Her name is Annelies, and she is from Vienna Austria.We spent some time together taking selfies with the pelicans!

Later that afternoon her ship left Key West, and I watched it leave the harbor from our boat. I had a good view of the ship as it headed out to sea.