I am staying in Gdansk at the moment and using my free time to do some exploring. Lots of interesting places here, so expect more reports from me soon. This one goes first: a crane in Gdansk Shipyard. I love those shipyard cranes. They are beautiful, they really look like birds, and they are massive, with cabins as big as houses. There's a lot of them in the shipyard and they come in a wide variety of models. You can almost think no two cranes are the same. Here's the one I climbed:
I don't know proper English names for all the parts of this thing so I just put numbers in the picture to show you where I got.
It's a (most probably) disused crane in the live section of a privatised part of the Shipyard
The story of the Shipyard is long and complicated. In 1996 most of the production was relocated to an island inside of the Shipyard, leaving lots of buildings abandoned. Some years later the abandoned part was taken over by a private owner who let some of the buildings to small private shipyards and some to the artists and a harley motorcycle club. There was a fence separating live part from all the artists. Which was very easy to jump over. In these early days it was best fun to have a few drinks at Artist's Colony and jump over the fence to explore the Shipyard and climb the cranes. It's a miracle nothing ever happened to anybody. Now the story's a bit different I will write a bit more in my next reports dedicated to the derelict parts of the Shipyard. Now back to the crane.
They are so massive that in the bottom part they usually have stairs instead of ladders.
I got to the machine room. It's beautifully old, but there were a few bloody pigeons there flying around like crazy. Sorry for the flash - I didn't have time to play with tripod and a torch with them bouncing off every wall.
Then I went to the roof of the machine room (NUMBER 1 in the picture), there was a kind of a terrace there, good place to take pictures.
This caught my attention first. It's a huge (140 m high) oil platform put upside down. They're renovating it now on the island in the inner part of the Shipyard.
Some ships being built...
Then further up. I climbed three ladders each leading to a small balcony. And finally got to NUMBER 2, below the counterbalance thing.
Nice view over the private part of the shipyard:
And there's a ladder going up along the "arm" of the crane.
I climbed it and got to NUMBER 3. There is a kind of a "nest" on the very top of the crane but it's tilted to the front so heavily you cannot stand in it not to mention put a tripod there. So i just laid on the ladder and took a few hand held pics.
View over the dock and the inclined plane used to launch the ships.
Looking down, over the top part of the crane.
And going back down...
I don't know proper English names for all the parts of this thing so I just put numbers in the picture to show you where I got.
It's a (most probably) disused crane in the live section of a privatised part of the Shipyard
The story of the Shipyard is long and complicated. In 1996 most of the production was relocated to an island inside of the Shipyard, leaving lots of buildings abandoned. Some years later the abandoned part was taken over by a private owner who let some of the buildings to small private shipyards and some to the artists and a harley motorcycle club. There was a fence separating live part from all the artists. Which was very easy to jump over. In these early days it was best fun to have a few drinks at Artist's Colony and jump over the fence to explore the Shipyard and climb the cranes. It's a miracle nothing ever happened to anybody. Now the story's a bit different I will write a bit more in my next reports dedicated to the derelict parts of the Shipyard. Now back to the crane.They are so massive that in the bottom part they usually have stairs instead of ladders.
I got to the machine room. It's beautifully old, but there were a few bloody pigeons there flying around like crazy. Sorry for the flash - I didn't have time to play with tripod and a torch with them bouncing off every wall.
Then I went to the roof of the machine room (NUMBER 1 in the picture), there was a kind of a terrace there, good place to take pictures.
This caught my attention first. It's a huge (140 m high) oil platform put upside down. They're renovating it now on the island in the inner part of the Shipyard.
Some ships being built...
Then further up. I climbed three ladders each leading to a small balcony. And finally got to NUMBER 2, below the counterbalance thing.
Nice view over the private part of the shipyard:
And there's a ladder going up along the "arm" of the crane.
I climbed it and got to NUMBER 3. There is a kind of a "nest" on the very top of the crane but it's tilted to the front so heavily you cannot stand in it not to mention put a tripod there. So i just laid on the ladder and took a few hand held pics.
View over the dock and the inclined plane used to launch the ships.
Looking down, over the top part of the crane.
And going back down...
