11 June 2010; Copenhagen Denmark day 2.

That weather remained indeed miserable and it looked more like autumn than high summer. The locals are complaining about the fact that their summer has not started yet while normally May and June are already good months for Denmark. Luckily there are a lot of things to do in Copenhagen which are not weather related and I doubt if most of the guests came here for a day at the beach. I just hope that the weather for the coming days will be better. Tomorrow should be a sunny but breezy day, as the frontal system with all this rain is moving out of the way in the course of the evening.

Days alongside are normally spent with conducting drills or with training and the latter is currently the case. We have two American fire fighters onboard who are reviewing the operational competence of the officers and crew and are holding training sessions where possible and needed. These trainers come onboard on a yearly basis and are crucial to the good performance of the shipboard fire fighting teams. As with everything in life, insights change, routines can be improved upon and also simply a review is already a good thing. If you never get input from the outside, from people who are normally not in the shipboard routine, then there is always the danger that you start to believe that what you do is the norm. Hence these visits are very useful. Thus I could see from the bridge that the mooring deck forward had suddenly become a danger zone where the ships teams were practicing hose handling, attack and retreat. Hose handling is on a cruise ship a very important and difficult matter. As a cruise ship is basically a block of apartments with twisting and turning corridors and lots of staircases, it is very difficult to have a team go through it with a hose, without getting that hose twisted or kinked. Good hose handling is of the essence and there are a lot of tricks that can be used to make it easier.

Another trainer we had onboard today was the man who trains us in the battle against the creepy crawlies. When we load provisions or when we sail in areas such as the Amazon, a lot of interesting bugs tend to come onboard and quite often with the firm intention of staying. In the days of yore, the ships used to be full of rats and cockroaches even the passenger ships were not immune. Now the ships are clean but there is a continuous battle to keep them clean. That battle consists of three steps. 1. Inspecting provisions before they come onboard and removing packaging as much as possible.
2. Monitoring all sensitive locations in the ship. 3. Applying treatment as soon as there is a sighting. That monitoring, with visual inspections and bait traps, has become a real art. A sort of guerrilla technique against a mostly un-seen enemy. For that training is needed and that is provided twice a year to the deck officers. They then in turn instruct the officers and crew of the hotel department. The results have been very good and the trainer was very happy with the state of the ship. Even after our exploits on the Amazon in March, the ship was kept clear of bugs.

So even in port, everybody is kept very busy to ensure that the HAL product remains of the highest standard.

We were ready to pull out of the port by 5 pm, following the local ferry to Oslo. Behind us followed in procession the Eurodam and the Star Princess, who both had been docked at the Copenhagen cruise terminal with is further away from downtown. Left behind was the Empress (the old Nordic Empress) that sails for Pullmantur. The Eurodam was on its way to Warnemunde and having too much draft for Drogden channel came racing by, heading North, so the guests had a good view of what is currently our newest ship. She had to go all the way around and that is a very tight schedule.

Tomorrow we are in Skagen. The sun is supposed to come through and it will be a breezy day. However if the wind comes from the direction that is forecasted as of this moment, we should have enough lee of the land to make it a successful day. Skagen is a small port and we will anchor just outside the port entrance and use the ships tenders for a shuttle service.