Marco Polo in Helsinki, 1. October 2012

We interrupt the regular programming to bring you a bunch of images from this month, showing the autumn foliage as well as ships. We start off with the last visitor of the 2012 summer cruise season, the Marco Polo.

Marco Polo

IMO 6417097
Name history: Alexandr Pushkin, Marco Polo
Built 1965, VEB Mathias-Thesen-Werft Wismar, East Germany
Tonnage 22 080 GT
Length 176,28 m
Width 23,55 m
Draught 8,17 m
848 passengers (lower berths)
915 berths
2 Sulzer-Cegielski diesels, combined 15 447 kW
2 propellers
1 bow thruster
Speed 16,5 knots

For a history of the Marco Polo, see the first entry on her. For an account on how the ship's exterior has been altered during her career, see the second entry on her.

As noted above, the Marco Polo was this summer's last cruise visitor to Helsinki (but not the year's last visitor - Fred. Olsen's Black Watch will be calling in late November as the first ship of the short winter cruise season). She called at the South Harbour and, as seems to be standard for CMV, she departed already at 14:30. The weather did not exactly cooperate, the sky being cloudy, but I (and my friend Olli Tuominen) went there never the less to document the end of the cruise season. Of course, as it happens we had both also documented the beginning of the cruise season.

Anyway, yes. The photographs below show the Marco Polo departing from Helsinki's Eteläsatama on 1 October 2012, photographed from Kustaanmiekka. Click on the images to see in larger size.

As is probably evident from the images, I did fiddle quite a lot with the saturation levels to bring out the colours of Autumn foliage.

Classic-looking ship, even if she doesn't really stand out from the background, the sky being about the same shade as the superstructure.

Of course, I could have strated the ship separately from the background - although I suspect that  to get the trees to stand out properly I would have needed to treat the sky separately as well.

It's interesting that CMV have decided to retain the Transocean Tours hull stripe on the Marco Polo - although since Transocean changed their livery at about the same time as the Marco Polo was chartered to CMV there sisn't much chance for confusion... but it's interesting never the less.

Next time: Silja Serenade