ship life

Today I move the narrative forward a year. I write this at the end of one of the longest days I have had on board. Last night we got the word that there was an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile. There was speculation that this quake would send a tsunami toward Hawaii that would rival the one in Indonesia a couple of years back. I went to bed last night not knowing what to expect in the morning.

Morning comes and I roll out of bed at my usual 6:15 for my 7:00 Aloha shift. As I settle into crew mess with my coffee and scrambled powdered flavorless eggs, the cruise director comes on over the PA and announces that there is a tsunami warning issued for Hawaii. The Port of Honolulu and the airport have been closed. All people are being evacuated to higher ground. People in hotels are not allowed lower than the sixth floor. Civil defense measures are in effect. People are at Wal-Mart stocking up on supplies. The safest place for this ship is actually at sea. That, and the port being closed means that we stay at sea until the coast guard clears us.

The tsunami is expected to hit land in Hawaii around 11:30 am Hawaii time, which is two hours behind Pacific time, 5 hours difference from Eastern. At least right now. The best estimate we are given is that it will be at least 5 pm until we will be able to port. Now understand, we usually hit port at 8 am Saturdays, feed breakfast to the disembarking passengers, flip the ship, and start bringing the new passengers on. The time frame works this way. Passengers start leaving the ship almost as soon as the gangway is down. There is a color coding system used to tell guests when to disembark. By 10:30 am last call to disembark the vessel has been called. This gives housekeeping a little head start on flipping the ship. This is also when the ship is restocked for the new week. Saturdays are really barely controlled chaos. Every department is involved and all work ridiculous hours. At noon embarkation begins. The only thing open is Aloha Café. The rooms will not be ready for a while so all passengers go to the café and wait until their deck is called as open. Usually by 2:00 pm they begin calling out decks available over the PA. Deck 12 is almost always first since there is only about 20 suites up there.

By 4:00 pm all rooms are ready and the passengers gather for their drill. It is a practice emergency mustering required by SOLAS. Its purpose is to make sure passengers know where to go in the event of an emergency. All ship services close, and all passengers are required to attend the drill. The drill takes place at 4:30 pm and takes about 15 minutes. Main dining and most of the other outlets will open for dinner service at 5:30. That is how it usually is.

Tsunami day 2010 went like this. Instead of feeding breakfast and then kicking the passengers off the ship, we stayed at sea. The powers that be, the captain of course, decided that the buffet would just stay open. So my usual 7am to 10 am Aloha shift just turned into a 7 - whenever. Of course, every eye was on the sea and all were waiting to see what would happen. By noon, there had been no significant action. Reports of 3 foot swells in Hilo. I think Maui got some 6 foot waves. All in all, no big reaction. But better safe than sorry. By 2:30 we get clearance to head to port. The tsunami warning has been cancelled. We dodged the bullet, or better yet, the bullet dodged us. So the port is open and we head in to dock. The buffet finally closes at 3. All guests are instructed to go to their rooms, gather their things and wait for word from the bridge. I finally get done in the buffet at 3:30. My schedule says to report to work in Skyline at 6 pm. But since I have no idea what is going on, I get dressed and head to work at 5:30. At 5:50 pm the last call for passengers to disembark is called. At 6:10 pm embarkation begins. That is a 20 minute turnaround, usually it is an hour and a half. The staff at Skyline, myself included, have the restaurant ready. All outlets are open and ready for business. The mandatory passenger drill is set for 9:30 pm, which means all guests must be fed and finished by 9 pm, because by SOLAS regulations, all guest services must be closed during drill. At 8:30 the first announcement that a deck is ready for occupancy comes over the PA. By 9:15 all decks are open.

Now I want you to stop and think of that a moment. On a normal Saturday, the housekeeping staff has around 9 hours to get all the rooms ready for occupancy. Today they did it in about 4 and a half. Housekeeping pulled off a freaking miracle today. I am totally impressed.

But now for the cluster fuck. All ship services are supposed to close for the drill. All restaurants are muster stations for passengers. Instead of closing the restaurant, the manager decides to keep seating passengers. He even goes as far as to tell passengers that they do not have to attend their MANDATORY drill. So the manager keeps seating people, people are showing up with their lifejackets for the mustering, everyone is running into each other, we are all exhausted because we have all been working all day. Damn. I am really hoping this manager get written up for violating SEMS and SOLAS. Now the passenger drill is finished, and we are finally closed. The cruise director comes on the PA once again and announces that due to delayed flights and late boarders the Aloha Café will stay open until midnight. To staff the café they get all the back waiters from main dining and pull them up to the buffet. That leaves all us front waiters to finished all the side work ourselves. We finally get done with all side work and cleaning about 11:00. So my usual Saturday afternoon in Honolulu was turned into a long ass day of nothing but work with short breaks. I pretty much worked from 7 am until 11 pm with two, one hour meal breaks. Oh, and the other fun tidbit of the day. Since the ship restocks for the next cruise on Saturday and we stayed at sea, and the restocking had just started by the time the new passengers started to arrive, guess what happened? We started running out of food. Oh how special. So while idiot manager is still trying to seat people, the kitchen is running out of food to even serve them. I would laugh if is didn’t suck so much.

The good news, this whole day was overtime, and there is no way corporate can or will complain about the extra hours.