06 December 2008, At Sea.

A beautiful day at sea. The sun shone all day and there was very little wind for most of the day. That very little wind got me worried about arrival Tampa. Normally when there is no wind in the Tampa area there is a heightened chance of Fog in the early morning hours and that could endanger the docking of the ship if the port closes. The only thing you can try to do is to go as fast as possible and hope that you are so early that you beat the fog to the dock. Thus I kept full speed until I had confirmation from the pilots that they concurred with the local weather forecast as published by the local metrological gurus and there would not be any fog during the coming night. Thus I was able to set my normal arrival time at the sea buoy for 01.30 am. I found out that the Carnival Legend, who is always one hour behind us, had done exactly the same thing.

There are now three cruise ships calling at Tampa. The legend and us on Sunday and the Grandeur of the Seas on Monday. She also used to call on Sunday, until two years ago and then we had to dock at terminal six, which is all the way into Ybor channel. That always created the issue that if they came in early, then we had to sail past that ship as she was on terminal 3, and if she left late we had to back out past her into the turning basin. Ybor channel is not that wide, and then loosing another 100 feet of the channel was not very pleasant at all. So I am quite happy that that schedule was moved to Monday’s so we have no issues anymore and we can dock at Terminal 3, which is much more spacious.

My day was filled again with the regular items such as the repeater parties and to my amazement the number of repeat – Mariner- guests onboard seems to be increasing every cruise. No sign here of a slow down in bookings. After the Amazon cruise (where everybody was or became a mariner due to the length of the cruise) the number hovered around 600, but this cruise we are touching the 700, out of the 1250 guests onboard. The number normally tops during the Christmas cruise and then tapers off for the new year as during that cruise we do have a lot of mariners, but they often bring (younger) relatives with them, who have not yet cruised and that brings the average down again. Another high number cruise is the Panama Canal cruise where we often reach the 80% and the transatlantics which can go even higher. All things to be very happy about and to appreciate but I was amazed as mostly after the Thanks Giving Cruise the numbers get less for one or two weeks. Next cruise we have another full house again, with close to 1250 guests on board.

As we are having a fairly large crew turn over tomorrow in Tampa, I had to read through numerous appraisals forms again. Apart from checking if they are fair, which I normally can make up from the way they are written, I check for completeness, signatures and future development plans. The idea of an appraisal form is that it is a tool to prepare somebody for their next career step. That means that the appraisal should finish with a number of points that the employee should work on in the future, or it should list the training courses that the employee should take. It is a bit more difficult if an employee has reached an end rank or is happy in a certain rank and does not want to progress any further. To keep such an employee primed for the coming periods, we often indicate that such a person should do special projects for the company, where we can tap into the long time experience of such a person. As a result we have a lot of Captains, Chief engineers and Hotel managers who during some time or the other are involved in a special project.

My regular project was to arrive at the Tampa sea buoy on time and to get the ship to the dock at the scheduled hour. There is supposed to be very little wind tomorrow and that would be a whole new experience for this season.