Short: Belgian Coast

And here we go again! Yes I know, because I sometimes have to drive all the way to

Ostend Airport for work, I usually look for ships in port as well and arrange my work accordingly, so in total I will do a number of short visits in between work.

This time I had almost a full day available so I started around 8 am in Oostende, the Eastern breakwater, one of the later major changes at our Belgian coastline is the perfect viewpoint for arriving ships in the morning, with the HMS Vindictive memorial bow section on display and the lighthouse right nearby. The view includes the new radar tower, located at the very tip of the breakwater.

Once there I could see the Hamburg arriving in the distance and followed her arrival as far as possible. See photos below.

I had some time left and was pretty hungry, because I left so early I didn't get any breakfast yet, in the area near the lighthouse there is a new block of apartments and small businesses so I decided to have a look around and sure enough found this very modern designed bakery that offered breakfast, I took the time to have my breakfast with cappuccino and take out the laptop for some administrative work and preparation for the afternoon. I really like these calm periods on busy days where I can just take out the laptop or the phone (I just changed my old iPhone 7 with 128GB for a brand new iPhone 16E with 256GB by the way!) and work a little bit on trips, freelance assignments or photos.

I had a small assignment in Bruges so I decided to make it my lunch as well and since I had the time, I went to park the car in the large parking lot of the train station, I decided to take advantage of the fact that my KIA CEED PHEV also has a charging cable so I parked in the EV reserved places and plugged it in for the first time to charge the car while I was out. Once plugged in I could take a walk in and around the city.

My assignment involved lunch and I took the time to finish my burger with fries and plan the rest of the day, of course this also included following shipping movements and check scheduled sailing times and weather. That last one was the most problematic as there was so much wind that both of my drones would be out of the question! My goal was now to photograph the departure of the Volendam in Zeebrugge. So ... my next stop was unsurprisingly Zeebrugge where I wondered around to see the ships, the Naval base and revisit some old relics I had photographed many times over the years.

Both Volendam and MSC Virtuosa were docked in Zeebrugge.

At the Naval base I noticed the "new" Belgica and the M924 Primula.

The old relics are an old harbourlight, in very poor condition, the former lightship Westhinder 2, also in pretty poor condition and the "restored but now again in very poor condition" Z533 Virtus. I continued towards the cruise terminal for some more shots before the Volendam would depart.

Volendam departed more or less on time and I photographed her in very strong winds as a last shoot for today!

THE END