The Shangor of Luxembourg

The Shangor has been with us all week. Since I've begun paying attention to the names of the ships, I've found that you can look them up online and get some cool information, such as the country whose flag it flies, when it was "born," and a lot more details if you're interested or persistent. I haven't spent much time investigating, but just by plugging the ship's name into Google, I came up with a few sites:

Ship Spotting: See this ship in other locations via photos others have uploaded to the web. Pretty neat.

See where the ships are in Oregon: Since this is a Google map, you can zoom in and get a better view. Put the cursor over a ship icon and you can see where it's going, etc. I don't understand the ETA, because the Shangor was to have been at the Port of Kalama just up the river in Washington on October 29. Maybe it went already and is on its way back to sea. I have no idea why it's been sitting out here for so long, though. It seems like about a week. From this map, there are other views you can get with other sets of info.

ShipPlotter: Astoria view. Hold the cursor over the names.

Statistics: And another photo.

Have fun. I expect to be posting more ships' names because I'm having fun with them and I can't help seeing the ships every day. When I stand up from my computer, they become part of my world.

And by the way, you can tell something else from the photo, too, if you know which side of the river I'm on. I'm in Oregon, and the river divides Oregon from Washington, so the mouth of the river is to the left in the photo (several miles away, but still to the left). Since the anchor is stationary and the ship is upriver from it in approximately a straight line, the tide in the river is flooding. We get approximately eight feet of tidal bore here. I can watch the pilings outside my window or from the back deck as the appear and disappear to that extreme. So the river is almost full now for today's tide level, and the broken pilings in view are nearly covered. When the tide is out far enough, we have mud below our building, and the raccoons love it, because they can come down and look for food. When the tide is turning, the ships turn with it and we get to see it at every angle until it reaches ebb, when the water is at its lowest. Sometimes you see ships at different angles when there are a number of them in sight. The river is wide enough that the currents and tides can differ across the width of the river. I took this photo around 8 this morning, and now at 10:09, the ship is facing me head on.