Change over day, is normally one of the busiest days of the whole cruise, for everybody, except the captain. There are no meetings, it is difficult to do inspections and there are no parties. The ship is in change over from the old cruise to the new one. Thus I normally spend change over day with clearing away the paperwork of the past cruise and deleting the hundreds of emails that have come in during that cruise.

This morning I had something else on my hands, loading carpet. Not exactly a job for a captain but caused by circumstances. A thing that happens during change over day is the crew change. That makes every department short handed. In total we had 31 crew leaving including a number of key players. Apart from the fact that they are leaving, they also have to do a handover to their relieve and that means they are not available until 1 pm. At 1 pm. There is the compulsory safety indoctrination meeting and nobody is allowed to start working on board until they have gone through this indoctrination. At the same time the deck department was testing Firescreendoors and ventilation stops. That is something we have to do, but only want to do when there are no guests on board. It is rather unsettling for a not-initiated to see all the doors in the ship closing and the familiar hallway suddenly disappearing. Also it does not give a good feeling if the Air-conditioning and ventilation suddenly stops. AC creates white noise in the ship and you get used to it. If it suddenly stops if feels as if a deadly silence descends over the ship and that really startles people. Thus we prefer to do it when there is only crew on board. It takes only one announcement to explain to them what is going on and the deck officers can push buttons to their hearts content.

All these things left nobody available for supervising the loading of the carpet. We were expecting 12 big rolls of carpet and they are too cumbersome to be stored inside the ship. So I wanted them on the bow. There is plenty space there, it does not bother the guests, and in port the upholsterers have a big open deck available to cut the rolls. We have permanently two upholsterers on board. They repair curtains, chairs and guests suitcases and they also spend time on renewing carpet where needed. I had arranged a crane for the loading and it was a fun few hours spend get the rolls on board. On a cruise ship we do not do much cargo handling (our cargo walks on and off by itself) so messing around with cranes and slings is a nice deviation from the normal things going on.

Once the rolls where on deck, the bo’sun with his sailors secured them against the bulkhead and covered them over with a tarpaulin against the sea spray. In the coming ports, when the guests are ashore, the Facilities Maintenance Manager, will start selecting area’s in the ship where the new carpet will go.

We left nicely on time, under a bright setting sun, which showed Venice at it’s best for our final departure. We are on our way to Copenhagen.