It is always nice when the weather predictions work out and this time they did. Hurricane Vance continued to diminish in strength and stayed on his projected trajectory and the Veendam could nicely stay 200 miles to the south and slip into the Bahia de Banderas. If you look at the chart of Mexico, all the ports are located in bays and inlets, or sheltered behind out cropping’s. Puerto Vallarta is a bit of an anomaly here as it is located very deep in a bay, about 20 miles from the Pacific. Then the port of Vallarta is in yet another small bay created by an estuary of a river not unlike other ports such as Puerto Chiapas.
Bahia de Banderas, or the bay of flags.
That makes Puerto Vallarta very sheltered as long as you can get into the Bahia de Banderas. This we could today and we did not notice much wind, although we did get the rain as predicted. Late last evening, early this morning and a few squalls during the day, so the Bo’sun was a happy camper today. All the salt was gone without having to use the sailors to hose the ship down. Puerto Vallarta also makes the rest of the crew happy, as right outside the Gate is Walmart and Sams Club. Excellent opportunity to stack up on toiletries, chips and other nibbles and in some cases Electronica.
This is a stock photo from the internet, with all the berths in the port occupied. Berth 2 is behind the white cruise ship’s stern on the left.
All day long there was a steady stream of crew going and coming from the shopping Centre across the road. As we were the only ship in, we docked at berth 1, but we as crew prefer berth 2. There is a Judas Gate in the security fence there and that makes the distance from berth 2 to Walmart less than 500 yards. It is literally right across the street. I spoke to a couple of Germans today, who ended up in Walmart due to the rain and they were highly amazed to see a very American supermarket in Mexico and nearly all the shoppers being crew. Maybe it rained too much for the locals. I did not make it ashore today, as training continued. Topic of interest today was: Helicopter Evacuations. Every ship has limited medical facilities. We do not have the space to sail around with a full-fledged hospital. The setup is to provide E&R and to keep people alive until they reach a medical Centre which can provide specialist treatment. 99% of the medical disembarks happen in the next port of call or at the end of the cruise.
The 1% happens enroute. Sometimes we can stop and a boat can come out, sometimes we have to deviate and make an extra port call and sometimes we have to ask the help of Search And Rescue (SAR) authorities such as the Coastguards of various countries. As many cruise ships sail along the coast of the USA, the USCG if quite often called upon to help the ships out. Once a SAR Centre has agreed to help, then the whole machinery on board comes in action. Medical will do their own thing but round 80 people are involved to make sure it happens and that it happens safely. It is not an everyday occurrence, which means you cannot do it on routine and also not every crewmember has experienced one before. So it has to be trained.
Sometimes we do a real exercise (except having a real helicopter there) and sometimes we do a table top, to run through the scenario and point out the pitfalls and the bottle necks. 90% of those pitfalls are Crowd Control related and the other 10% is the eagerness of officers and crew to start helping out and do things that are not in their purview. I have seen it that Hotel Directors suddenly start help carrying stretchers while normally they would never do that, and they should not. We have specially trained stretcher teams for that. The Hotel Directors function is to coordinate his/her staff, so that it all gets done properly and safely.
Most of that is keeping the guests and curious crew away from the scene …………..and from view points where the loading of the helicopter can be seen. Nothing is more irritating for a helicopter pilot than to have a 1000 flashes go off as everybody starts up their camera’s and phones. Today we did a table top as many of the crew were new to this. Next step will be to do a drill, which is always great fun as it takes place on the outside decks where everybody can really mess around with the fire hoses.
Early tomorrow morning, we will pass Cabo San Lucas, no doubt under a rain cover left by Vance and then sail up the coast of the Californian Peninsula. I have to start thinking about packing as it looks like that I will be finally leaving the ship in San Diego. I was scheduled to be on board for 14 days that turned into 47 days.
November 6, 2014 at 3:58 am
Hopefully your schedule will bring you again to Puerto Vallarta later this winter.