Icebreaker Ship Urho

This time I'm writing about the visit that I made to the icebreaker ship Urho in Helsinki. Cold, cold winter is on its way, and icebreakers are getting ready for their season of action. Now, I know this blog post has absolutely nothing to do with diving, but I'm writing it all the same. Simply because visiting the ship was so cool.

Icebreaker ship Urho

 Anyway, I was lucky enough to get invited to visit the icebreaker Urho along with a local yacht club. I soon discovered that when it comes to ships, icebreakers are just about the most macho things you'll ever find! They're big, strong machines that are built for one purpose. They toil away in the worst possible weather to keep the sea open and safe for other ships that sail the frozen seas in the wintertime. They are extremely powerful and can smash through solid ice a meter thick.

This is what you see from the bridge of an icebreaker. Its pretty high.

Urho is the flagship of the Finnish icebreaker fleet. It was built in Helsinki and launched in 1975, and it is still very much in operation after almost forty years. It has four propellers, two stern and two in the fore. That is one of the many design innovations that make the ship so manoeuvrable and effective at what it does. The ship is 104 meters long. It has five v-12 diesel engines that crank out a massive 5000 horsepower. Each!! That's a total of 25 thousand hp! They don't move the ship, though. Instead they provide power to the electric motors that are actually connected to the propellers.

One of the five engines of icebreaker Urho. Each of the 12 cylinders is so big you could probably squeeze a ten-year-old through them. Don't, though. You should never squeeze any child into any part of an engine. Just saying.

Getting a chance visit a real icebreaker ship was an awsome experience. We had a fun day on board Urho, and learned a lot about the business of breaking ice. I'll leave you with this YouTube video of icebreaker Urho in action. It's not long, and it'll give some idea of what it is like on the bridge of an icebreaker.

Thanks again for reading! As always, any comments are highly appreciated, so if you have anything at all to say, please do leave a message below. Now, I'm off to Thailand for a fortnight of tropical diving, so that's probably what I'll be writing about next. In about two weeks.