It was an early arrival this time, mainly to beat the crowd. We were together today with the Saga Ruby, the Grand Mistral, the Pacific, the Marco Polo and the Silver Shadow and all had planned to be at the pilot station at 6 am. The Saga Ruby decided in the end to do the same ting as I did and went for an early arrival as well. The other four kept the same pilot time, so the pilots had to decide who was going first. Right in between there were several ferries going in and
two were only coming in, while the Veendam was already dispatching its tours.

Apart from a shower in the mid morning, it was a nice day, not too warm so good for sightseeing. The longest tour today had a duration of 11 hours and was not expected to be back on board until 8 pm. Normally there is a traffic delay as well for the buses trying to get out of Rome and as a result we did not sail until close to 9 pm. The motorway between Rome and Civitavecchia is very good it just takes a long time to get out of Rome itself.

With the ship being nearly empty of guests, I had the perfect opportunity to do some onboard inspections. That is what nowadays a lot of the captain’s work is all about. Inspecting and auditing. It is a fact of life that everything is getting more and more regulated from the outside but also from the inside. With Holland America expanding, more company procedures are streamlined and codified so that the product and the shipboard routines are the same from ship to ship. That means walking around and checking if it is all done according to the latest updates,

The company has all their rules and regulations streamlined in a Safety Management System and everything is posted in manuals and directives on an Intranet system. So when in doubt of something a search engine is available and things can be found. This aspect of the cruise business keeps changing very fast and thus we also have that intranet connection at home. During our leave period we check once or twice a week our company mail box to see what the latest updates are. In that way we do not have to catch up with an enormous backlog when we get back to the ship. Our people in the office are connected to the system by means of a black berry when not behind the desk. Some of them get so much correspondence that if they do not check their mail box very frequently it gets overloaded. That earned these Black berry’s the nickname Crack-berry’s, as you can get easily into the enslaving habit of checking the thing every five minutes all day and night long and starting to feel lost without it.

I remember with a bit nostalgia the year I joined the company and one day the captain got highly excited because he received a telex from the head office. Only one, but it was the most important event of the day. It had to be discussed at great length and the captain found that he had done a good days work after sending an answer back. Now the ship goes through around 400 emails a day, both external and internal and nobody thinks it is unusual.

Tomorrow we are in Livorno, or Leghorn as the British call it.