Silja Europa in Helsinki, 24 January 2013

This is the 300th Kships entry. We continue with the recent months' trend of staying on the pulse of current events (which has given the blog a record-breaking number of visits last month) and celebrate the milestone with photographs of the Silja Europa's second visit to Helsinki as a Tallink ship.

Silja Europa

IMO 8919805
Built 1993, Meyer Werft, Germany
Tonnage 59 912 GT
Length 201,78 m
Width 32,60 m
Draught 6,80 m
Ice class 1 A Super
3 123 passengers
3 696 berths
350 cars
932 lane metres
4 MAN diesels, combined 31 800 kW
2 propellers
2 bow thrusters
1 stern thruster
Speed 22 knots

For a history of the Silja Europa, see this entry.

Last Autumn, Tallink Grupp (the owner of both Tallink and Silja Line, in case it was unclear to someone) decided to swap the Silja Europa and Baltic Princess around, the Silja Europa with her troublesome engines coming to the slow-paced Helsinki-Tallinn 22-hour cruise route and the Baltic Princess with her more powerful engines moving to the Turku-Mariehamn-Stockholm run in her place. The Silja Europa entered service on the Tallinn route under the Estonian flag on 23 January 2013, while the Baltic Princess will enter service on the Turku route after a longer docking period on 1 February.

The photographs below show the Silja Europa arriving in Helsinki West Harbour on 24 January 2013, her second call to the port as a Tallink ship. I was inspired to go and take these photos after seeing some beautiful images taken by Tero Söderholm (also a frequent commenter of this blog) the previous day, which are up at Marimetraffic.com. Hence I cannot take credit for being in the lishgt place at the right time all for myself. So thank you, Tero.

Click on the images to see them in larger size.

This image should be the cover of a book. Although it's hard to imagine what kind of a book would need a photo of the Silja Europa in Tallink colours as a cover.

Waymarkers mark the way to the ship.

I might have damaged my eyes by taking this picture but it looks so good...

Here we are getting more of a neat winter atmosphere...

Dat light.

And those reflections.

Timing is everything.

In this one you don't even notice the ship is no longer in Silja colours.

Then some long-exposure-and-tripod -fiddling as the ship is docking. For some reason the ship took it's sweet time at the quay, mooring half an hour after the scheduled arrival.

The ship actually looks surprisingly good without hull texts. And the Tallink funnel symbol works very well as white on a blue background.

The perfect moment for night-time photography. This shot and the one above was made possible by the big piles of snow gathered next to the habour security area fence.

Next time: Finlandia interiors (yes, again).