A River in the Sea

Educational Crap #02

Consider this photograph that I pulled off of Google Earth.   This is the southern half of South America.

Image courtesy of Google Earth

If it isn't obvious, the light blue part around the land is part of the southern continental shelf and the dark blue part is deep water of the Atlantic Ocean on the right and the Pacific Ocean on the left. 

Here's a closer look at the portion of the above picture where Buenos Aires is located:

Image courtesy of Google Earth

There are two interesting things to learn here.  First is that Buenos Aires is not on the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the city is over 175 miles away from the Atlantic.  The water that Buenos Aires is located on is the delta of the Silver River (Rio de La Plata).

When Mandy and I arrived we quickly noticed that the water was not the deep blue that one is used to seeing upon boarding a cruise ship.  This water looked very muddy, so much so that there was a bit of Ewwww! in our conversation about people we saw on the beach.  We didn't think it would be a wonderful experience swimming in the muddy waters. 

Rio de La Plata Delta from Google Earth

Rio de La Plata Delta - Satellite image

All of our sailing on the first day of our cruise was in the muddy water of this river.  When you think about it, the water being brown in this part of the river (the Delta) wasn't really that strange.  The river that feeds into the delta goes north as far as Paraguay and beyond so bringing sediment that discolors the waters on the coast of Buenos Aires is quite reasonable.

The second interesting thing to learn here is that the water is an average of 13 feet deep.  That may not seem interesting at first, but when you consider that our ship has a draft that is nearly three times that deep you realize that 13 feet is quite shallow.

While we were eating dinner the first evening I glanced out the window and noticed another massive ship that was so close that it looked like it was touching our rail.  At the time I thought is was one of the craziest things I had ever seen.  

It turns out that we sail the first few hundred miles of our journey in a narrow river that exists in the delta.  The river in the delta is constantly dredged to allow the port of Buenos Aries to stay open. 

Picture courtesy of Mickey Live

The path of the river we followed (shown above) only has two or three places wide enough for two ships to pass so for the most part this "River in the Sea" is a one-way passage.