One of the neat things about working in an office right on the harbor (and I mean right on the harbor -- you could swan-dive out the nearest window into the water) is that you get to watch all of the harbor traffic. You get used to seeing particular types of boats every day -- commuter ferries, tourist ships of various sizes making round-trip tours of the harbor, police and fire boats, big container ships being pulled by tugboats in and out of Hamburg's container port. Once or twice a week, there's a giant floating crane that makes its way from one end of the harbor to the other.
Occasionally, though, something truly unique and noteworthy floats past our office.
Yesterday was a downer, for various reasons -- so watching the British aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal steam by just before lunch brought a needed dose of little-boy let's-all-run-to-the-balcony gee-whiz into the day. She was being escorted by a fire boat, shooting celebratory jets of water into the air; a school of smaller boats packed with sightseers followed alongside, keeping a respectful distance. Helicopters circled overhead.
After the Ark Royal passed by, everyone's next thought was "wasn't it awfully small for an aircraft carrier?" "We see container ships bigger than that every day!" And compared to the average American aircraft carrier, it certainly is: almost four hundred feet shorter, weighing a quarter of the tonnage and with about a third of the crew. I guess that being part of the all-powerful British empire just isn't what it used to be.
If you look at the pictures on the Ark Royal's Website, you can see the noticeable upward-curving "ski jump" at one end of the flight deck: no wonder the British developed the vertical-take-off Harrier jet.
Later that day, a truly gigantic container ship -- fully-loaded and about as tall as our office building -- passed by outside our windows. On a deck that was a couple of stories above our heads, I could see a mini-parking-lot of cars (presumably for the use of the crew while the ship was in port) lining one side of the ship. In its own way, it was just as much of an engineering achievement as the Ark Royal -- but it didn't pack any lethal power, so I think that I was the only person who even looked up from his desk.
In the media: Nach 15 Jahren kehrt die "Ark Royal" zurück, Hamburger Abendblatt, February 27th
(The Ark Royal Returns After 15 Years -- automatic Google translation)