Ships, ships and more ships

We get visited regularly by lots of ships.  Cruise ship season is here, and we get visited by some very small ships, with just 100 passenger, to big monsters like the one below, which holds nearly 4000 people!  On the "cruise ship days" the population of Stanley literally doubles, or even trebles for the day!!

The large ships though have to moor outside the harbour, and the passengers are ferried in on smaller tenders.

 Not quite sure that I would want to be on the tender in the picture above.  The day was fairly windy, and the tenders were bombarded with spray for the mile or so they are the boat!!  It is quite funny to watch loads of green faced tourists getting off the boats at the jetty.

If you arrive on one of the smaller boats, like below, the transfer is often by Gemini inflatable, which can be just as bad in rough weather, but only for about 300 yards!

 We then had the chance to visit HMS Clyde, which is the Royal Navy offshore patrol ship down here.  She is scheduled to be here until 2012, when she is expected to return to the UK for a refit.

We had a tour around the boat by a lady who looked extremely familiar.....she was one of the officers featured in the TV Show Ice Patrol which was about HMS Endurance!

As we were down at FIPASS, we had the chance to snap a few other ships, which included the James Clarke Ross of the British Antarctic Survey.

The Polarcus Nadia is a revolutionary ship which I ended up googling to find out why the bow was so weird...It is called an "X Bow" and gives lower drag.  The boat is used for seismic surveys of the ocean floor and strata below.  It is down for the next round of oil exploration.