03 May 2013; At Sea.

Today we were sailing off the coast of Oregon, having gone past Cape Mendicino. The weather chart had indicated that there was a rough patch of weather coming and indeed the wind started to blow around 5 am: exactly on schedule. I had anticipated for this as much as possible by going full out on the engines as I knew that I would lose some speed here. The 30 to 40 knots of wind does slow the ship down by half a mile and then the swell that comes with it 13 to 16 feet, will do the rest. The ride remained quite pleasant compared to what it could have been with this weather. As it was mainly a light pitching movement I did not get any reports about guests being inconvenienced. The highest wind we observed was around 2 pm in the afternoon when it breezed up to 43 knots. That is a wind force 9 on the Beaufort scale. In the evening it started to abate again and then by tomorrow morning we should be completely out of it. If that happens then I do not expect that it will affect us very much for our arrival time.

During the whole cruise we have been working on a project for sprucing up the crew mess room. This area consists out of two parts, the eating area where the buffet is and the entertainment area which can be reached by a connecting door. Because the Statendam continues to win every bonus that the company has (last week another $2000, because we reached our targets again in reducing guests and crew accidents) we have a lot of money in the crew fund, which we then spend on various projects.

We finished the Petty Officer Mess room last year and now it was time to “attack” the crew recreation area. We cannot do anything with the design of the space as that would be a safety issue but we can spruce it up with a new layout and cosmetics. To keep the ship standard to a certain degree we followed the setup of the Veendam where the focus point was a bandstand that could be used as a TV viewing area as well. Under the leadership of the Staff Captain all the skills and expertise that the ship has was put to work with some startling results. It took nearly 14 days to accomplish it all as the regular work on board continues as well and, as we are a ship, you always run out of things and you cannot just hop on your bike to get the missing part.

Plus the Human Resources Manager had to go shopping for the decorations and for that we had to wait until Puerto Vallarta and San Diego. So last night was the grand opening of the forward crew mess which has now been renamed to Statendam Square. As a captain I can make all sorts of democratic decisions by myself and thus I thought it was a nice idea if the employee of the month would do the cutting of the ribbon.

It was a bad day for our birders today, as due to the strong winds (wind and ships speed combined) on the bow area; they had to camp out on the Lower Prom Deck under boat nbr 2. But all the gear was there again and eager faces were scanning the horizon.

There were numerous whales around, so hopefully the cruise is living up to expectation. Tomorrow morning we will be approaching Strait Juan de Fuca and the weather there looks quite good. No more than 20 knots of wind and getting less when sailing through. Going in we will hug the Washington State side as the border between the USA and Canada goes straight through the middle. That means that in October when we are outbound, we will sail in the Canadian waters of the same Strait. When we get to Victoria the weather will be nice, with a warm day and a pleasant evening. Vancouver the day after is supposed to see temperatures in the 80’s. Nice for those who live in Vancouver, but it makes me worry about very low hanging clouds again.