15 February 2016; At Sea.

Today we are sailing north of the Bahamas on our way to the Turks and Caicos Islands and it is a bit wobbly outside. Nice and sunny but the weather system which moved over us has quite a bit of wind in its tail, more than really was expected. It is not that bad, apart from the occasional movement of the ship you can hardly notice that there is a sort of gale blowing outside, mainly because you do not equate a gale with sunny weather. The ship is almost full to capacity, just a little bit less than last cruise when each bed and each sofa was filled up. But that was a real party cruise and now we are back to our regular clientele with a surprising number of younger families on board. I do not know if somewhere in the States the schools are on break but there must be something as I do not expect that all these children are home schooled.

My six new officers arrived yesterday and they all made it safely to the ship, including one from New Zealand who had been on the way for 30 hrs. The rest is from Holland and England and those are flights which are easier to deal with. All have sailed with Holland America before and thus I can to spend less time on the basics of how a cruise ship company operates and instead can dive directly in the deep end with safe working practices and my “use your brain” mantra. When you are a cadet, and it is the same for any cruise ship company, you observe and you are allowed to help out with regular maintenance, as long as the responsibility remains with a licensed officer. It simply has to do with insurance. Insurance companies want to see certificates with stamps and seals and of course a cadet does not have those. As a result there is very “little hands” on a cadet can do. Now they have a certificate and thus we can go for it.

Standing and observing is different than having to make decisions yourself. Making decisions yourself and the feeling of being held responsible in the end for the decisions that you made creates a totally different perspective. And with that we started today. Step one: know your ship, know where you are at all times and how to get to a location via the shortest route (if possible) but always the safest route.    So while we walked around, my constant question was, where are we now and how do you know that?

This is a diagram of a ferry with 5 main vertical fire zones. large cruise ships normally have 6, 7, or 8

There is a basic division of a ship which all crew members have to know. Horizontally there are the deck numbers: for the Nieuw Amsterdam the crew decks C, B, A and then the passenger decks 1 to 14. Then vertically there are the Main Fire Zones which split up the ship in 8 sections. As a guest you can recognize those when you see the thick Fire screen doors recessed in the walls, most of them are located around the staircases. So each crew member should know exactly where he or she is if an announcement is made: Evacuate Deck 4 Zone 3. Without having to announce or to give specific names or cabin numbers; the section is enough. In this case it is the middle part of the ship where passenger cabins are located and at once Cabin Stewards can start evacuating guests from that area.

We have one trick to make it easier for the new crew: read the numbers on the Fire screen doors. Each door is labelled xx,yy,zzz    xx = deck,  yy is the zone, zzz is the door number. This is in our case 04. 03. 257. = Deck 4, zone 3, door 257. Because the ships now look very similar when going from deck to deck, this fire screen door numbering is a big help to immediately get your bearings when ending up somewhere you were not expecting. The group caught on very quickly and that helps them when reporting in their exact location if they are out there on a mission but also with quickly recognizing where they are when trying to ascertain their proximity to a danger area.

This is the Noordam at Grand Turk. Look around the bow and you can see how small the dark blue water area is.

Tomorrow we will arrive around 07.00 hrs. and if all goes well we should be docked by 08.00 am. I hope that during the night the wind will abate a little bit as it is not much fun to dock with high winds there. The dock is fully exposed to winds as the land is very flat and the ship has no room to drift as the dredged out area around the dock is not very wide.