Another Weekend, Another Ship

So Saturday I went to visit a bulk carrier. This one, the "Kildare", is really big--it weighs in fully loaded at 210,000+ metric tons. On Saturday, the ship was arriving in Singapore with a full cargo of iron ore, bound from Tubarao, Brazil, to Qingdao, China. She was stopping in Singapore to fill up her gas tank, as it were.

Here you can see the bow of the ship as we approach her in the shore launch. Note that the starboard side anchor is not yet down, which is due to the fact that the ship is still moving as it takes a long time for so much mass to stop.
A closer view:
Here you can see that the starboard side anchor is already dragging in the water in preparation to be lowered:

Hey everybody!
To get a sense of the size, take a look at the little tick-marks under the word "Kildare". Those indicate that the bottom of the ship is a full 18 meters under water:



Big:

So after climbing up the ladder onto the deck, this is what the view is like. There are a series of holds with big doors which open up by rolling to the side, splitting down the middle:

Looking over all the holds back toward the bridge. Notice how clean the ship is!

The view from the bridge:
This ship had a lot of Eastern European crew members. They had some motivational material posted in their weight room:
Sunset: