06 and 07 July; Glacier Bay and Ketchikan, Alaska.

Today a combined blog over two days. My time on the Volendam is coming to an end and in Vancouver I will transfer to the Amsterdam. So things are slowly “heating up” for the lack of a better word, a lot of instructions and practical training, plus the administration of 36 crew who are in training for their Lifeboat Assistant certificate.  Glacier Bay was a great day for the guests and Ketchikan was a great day for me, as it rained – summer rain – and that meant very little wind and so the lifeboat could go down for training.

It is a peculiar thing that guests care less (read – officially complain) about the rain when Ketchikan is the last port compared to when it is the first port. North bound (Ketchikan is most likely the first port of call) sightseeing is high on the agenda for everybody. It is time to experience the last frontier. Southbound the guests have already seen a lot of Alaska so shopping becomes a focal point. Walking around somewhere in Idaho with an Alaska Windbreaker suddenly becomes are very cool thing to do. And then rain does not matter that much anymore.

Today it drizzled for most of the day, but that did not stop anybody and Ketchikan commerce was having a great day. All berths occupied and a possible total of 11,000 potential shoppers ashore around noon time.  Even if only one in 10 buys a T-shirt, then that is still a lot of T shirts. Not counting fridge magnets and other trinkets. Some shops sell the really nice stuff, such as sculpted eagles and dolphins or killer whales and by looking at the prices, even if they would sell just one piece a day; they would have a very good day.

I was a bit shocked when I walked ashore in Ketchikan to find out that the Post Cards are disappearing. In the last 30 years I have been diligently collecting the local postcards that show port scenery. A great way of keeping up with the changing face of a town and the changing face of the cruise industry. Normally new cards are issued every year and the ships in port photographed. Thus I have the ships/ port scenes that were common in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, up to now.  Running ashore to get the new batch for 2014 was going to be a quickie.  It was not.  A lot of shops did not have them anymore and the very few who did, were selling off last year’s stuff or from even before. Modern Media I suspected and when I talked to a shop manager that knew me from years gone by, the answer was yes. Hardly anybody buys postcards anymore, let alone send them home. You post on Facebook or send a selfie to your grandfather somewhere in Kentucky.  The lady also told me, as her sister was working at the local post office, the sending of postcards had gone down since 2010 by about 80% in Ketchikan. Wasn’t that the year the Smart Phone was invented??

I came home with only four postcards. Also from previous years but somehow I had not seen them before. I could not even find a 5^th, to get the discount of 5 for one dollar. I will have to start keeping an eye out if this is a worldwide phenomenon or typically of the North American market. I just wonder, do Chinese send postcards??

Docked behind us was the Seven Seas Navigator. Sailing for Regency/Seven Seas. I had not seen that ship before in real life although knew about her.  When Seven Seas started out, they bought a navy hull that was lingering on in a Russian Navy shipyard in St. Petersburg. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union the plan had been to build a new ship with antennas on the top, with one of it functions being to track submarines. The Soviet Union fell apart and the soviet military machine came more or less to a grinding halt.  So the Akademik Nikolay Pilyugin was sitting there half-finished in St. Petersburg. The hull was then bought by the originals sponsors of Regency, V- ships and the Carlson Group (who own Radisson) it was towed to the Marriott yard in Italy and finished as a 170 meter long, all outside Suite, Cruise ship for 490 guests.

Increase the water surface on which the ship rests and you improve stability.

When you build a cruise ship on a cargo or navy hull, you get stability problems as cruise ships are top heavy compared to cargo ships with their cargo low in the hull near or under the water line. To alleviate that stability problem, you have to widen the ship’s hull, creating more buoyancy for the same hull size. At the aft end it is called a duck foot as it does resemble that to a certain extent. Add more buoyancy on the sides and you call it sponsoons. The Seven Seas Navigator has a stylized combination of both, which makes it look at little bit odd, compared to the regular cruise ship boxes next to here. I was glad that I could have a good look at her.

Tomorrow we will be sailing through the Interior Passage and the weather for the afternoon looks good, so the guests should have a great afternoon. The Tide is at the perfect time of 21.30 and that means that the run to and through Seymour Narrows will be in day light. What can be a better ending to the cruise? I will be examining the Lifeboat Assistant trainee’s, so I will not see much of it, but then I have been there before.