24 April, Kusidasi, Turkeye.

Today was our chance to sample a bit of Turkish delight. Kusidasi is one of the most organized and clean ports in the whole area and for a ships captain it is always great to know that everything will run like clock work. It also did so this time. Kusidasi has two piers that can accommodate 3 medium sized cruise ships and one big one. We arrived at 06.15 at the pilot station and in the course of 40 minutes four cruise ships docked at the port, each within a 10 minute interval. Security is very good, the guards are friendly and everything is done to make the guest feel at home.

Although the town is not that big, it is a shopper’s paradise with good bargains in leather, carpets and jewelery. As is custom, you have to bargain a little bit but that is part of the game and most of the time the end result is acceptable for both the seller and the buyer. Only the bank account can suffer considerably. At least mine did. I went briefly ashore to buy one leather jacket, ended up with three and that gave my wife the excuse for an extensive visit to the jewelery store. We got married on the arrangement of 50 – 50, which means 50 cents for me and 50 dollars for her and here in Kusidasi that rule was exercised to the limit.

Most of our guests go on tour to the ancient city of Ephesus, which is one of the best preserved cities from about 2000 years ago. The weather was once again great for sightseeing with sunny skies and temperatures in the mid sixties which is just pleasant to rummage around old ruins.

For the crew it was General Drill time today. Apart from the normal fire, boat and other drills that we stage on a regular basis, the General Drill is a full sequence exercise. This time we started with a (simulated) bomb explosion that caused a fire to go out of hand, needing the whole ship to go to general (boat/raft) stations and concluded with a disembarkation drill. The latter meant that we marched all the crew (580 of them minus the watch keepers) off the ship and lined them up at the ports safe zone.

Under the international security rules, all ports have a safe assembly area where guests from cruise ships assemble if something would happen on their ship. It is generally within the secure area of the port but away from the ship in danger. It was quite an amazing sight to see all the crew wearing lifejackets march in orderly fashion off the ship and assemble boat by boat and raft by raft at the port assembly area. From the moment I gave the command it took less then seven minutes before the last crewmember had left the ship using only one gangway. In a real emergency we would use more gangways to speed up the procedure even more. The only restraint then would be the agility of the guests. We have special wheelchair teams lined up to assist the less ambulant among the guests to get ashore as fast as possible as well.

The port security officer in Kusidasi was a very happy man who looked liked he had won the lottery. He had all those fancy plans on paper, of what to do with a cruise ship in an emergency and never the chance to practice it and now suddenly here was that cruise ship Veendam who gave him the chance of a life time. We started our exercise at 09.25 and by 10.30 it was all done. We checked our security procedures, fought a full (simulated) fire, prepared lifeboats for disembarkation and marched 580 crew off and back onto the ship all this without any in-convenience to our guests. Most were on tour and those still on board found it fascinating to see all the crew lined up, as it is always difficult to picture how many 580 crew are.