Sweet Dreams at night for Disney

The high winds which were blowing across the UK yesterday must have faded before they reached northern Germany, because Disney Dream (above) set off as scheduled on the complicated journey from shipyard to the sea on Friday night.
Unfortunately for the thousands of spectators who turn up in their camper vans for these events, the whole 26-mile journey will have been completed in darkness.
The founders of the Meyer-Werft yard at Papenburg can never have imagined when they began building wooden boats in 1795 that one day they would be constructing ships as big as the 128,000-ton Dream.
The water level in the River Ems has to be artificially raised by closing a tidal barrier, and road and railway bridges are raised, swung aside – and in some cases temporarily demolished – to allow ships to pass.
They usual procedure is to travel down the river stern first at a stately three to four knots, towed by a tug and with another at the bow to help with steering. In daylight, the most spectacular moment comes when ships on the conveyance cross a four-lane autobahn which passes underneath the river in a tunnel – as my picture of Celebrity Eclipse (below) shows.
Disney Dream will be undergoing sea trials next week and has a few more weeks of work to finish her interiors before being handed over to her owners in December and crossing the Atlantic for a naming ceremony in Port Canaveral, Florida, in January.