On the Bridge

 Borealis Saturday 22nd April 2023

I woke up somewhat late so I had a late breakfast in the View buffet restaurant, after which I brought down some milk for Albina to enjoy her cereals in the cabin. I sat outside on our balcony in the warm morning sunshine. A couple of boobies flitted past my side of the ship and I managed to catch them on my Iphone. 

Then I wandered forward to the Observation Paltform on my deck. A group of five or so stalwart watchers were out there with binoculars and expensive cameras in tow. The said they had seen nothing this morning but suddenly they got very excited concentrating on something on their left. I followed their gaze as they watched whatever it was disappear down the ship's port side. They were discussing passionately whether it was an albatross or a booby. "It was a frigate bird," said one lady conclusively, and that was the end of that discussion. 

I returned to the balcony to check on some notes and reminded Albina it was time to get up as we were nearing 11 and needed to get to lunch by 12 noon in order for us to meet Sammie at 12.55. Also our maid Atitaya needed to get prompt access to our cabin to clean it because she was to be on a training course later. The poor lady has a hard time with us. We do not hold regular hours and Albina often stays in bed at times that are quite awkward for anyone trying to get access to the room. It is still the curse of those BA night shifts which she worked for a couple of decades

I was keen to watch a talk on the 007 franchise, not having missed a single film. As I was expecting, it was a jocular anecdotal romp through all the James Bond films by film buff Helen Pointer. Each film was often being covered with a single revealing sentence and a single slide, but still with rich pickings of incidental scraps of information that nobody knew, such a young Steve Segal being the stuntman who broke Sean Connery’s wrist or Dolph Lundgren starting his career as baddie in “A View to a Kill” because he was Grace Jones’ boyfriend, or the fact that the steel cable which Jaws (Richard Kiel) bites through with his teeth was actually made of liquorice. Those, like Albina and me, who were watching the talk on their TV screens in their cabins, instead of coming into the lecture theatre, would only have seen the speaker’s slides, but not the speaker herself. She chided us for that by saying she was wearing a bikini just like Ursula Andress on the beach in the first Bond film. Not sure how many screen viewers rushed into the lecture theatre at that moment.

At midday I waited to meet Sammie at the Guest Services. She was a little late and Albina lost interest after a few minutes and went off shopping. Although the invitation was to meet the Captain he was not there and I was greeted on the bridge on Deck 7 by his number 2, Navigation Officer Alex Chadwick. At Sammie’s request I repeated the broad gist of my lecture and Alex agreed that my account was broadly correct. Fred Olsen had conceived of this trip 3 years before, at the earlier phase of the pandemic as a filler to go between their regular scheduled tours to Scandinavia and the Mediterranean, but it was a risk based on the idea that covid should be under control by 2023. The Norwegian cruises by Fred Olsen are standard everyday fayre for their three passenger ships and normally each of them does longer round the world or long-distance cruise early in the year as it is the safest for the passengers by avoiding the main months for tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes. The broader concepts are worked out at Fred Olsen’s head office in Ipswich or its home port in Liverpool. The proposed route is then discussed with the captains and senior navigation and destination officers of each vessel to check what is more feasible. As they were starting on this occasion with the premise that they would be commemorating Jules Verne’s book, that excluded the possibility of a circumnavigation in a westward direction. Also, as they were only following the routes which covered Fogg’s sea journey they knew they had to include Brindisi, Suez, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama and San Francisco, and initially Shanghai, before the political dimension and the strict covid restrictions in China made that made that last port impossible. Also, Aden and Calcutta, which Fogg visited, would not have been practical destinations, for reason of security in the first case, and unnecessary distance in the second. So they were dropped. The rest was a matter of how to fill in the gaps so that the cruise could stretch to the promoted period of 80 days. So, Lisbon was added because the route would have to go that way in order to reach Brindisi via Gibraltar, the Egyptian visits to Cairo and ancient Egyptian sites were an added attraction that brought in the ports of Port Said and Sofaga to the cruise. Goa and Kochi were attractive destinations that would have been on the necessary route and added just two days, which in turn enabled some passengers to be offered a 3-day visit by land and air to the Taj Mahal. There was just enough time to squeeze in a stop in Vietnam and also the three extra destinations in Japan (perfectly timed for the cherry blossom weeks) and three destinations in Hawaii needed to break up the crossing of the Pacific and thus lengthening the journey by an extra six days in total. After San Francisco it was a matter of using the most attractive destinations in a route that would take in the necessity of utilising the Panama Canal. Although Fogg had used New York, that would not now be a viable option for this ctuise as we would be too far south and the journey from Azores to Southampton would have taken the same as the journey from New York to Southampton, but without the attraction of those warm destinations in Colombia and the Caribbean on the way. Hence the logic behind the current tour. The rest was a matter of making sure each of the ports could handle a vessel the size of Borealis and that arrangements could be made with the appropriate immigration authorities. This explanation tied in very neatly with the content of my lecture, but obviously in far greater detail.

Alex showed mearound the controls of the vessel in the huge expanse of the bridge. There were only two other officers on the bridge but everything was being han. dled as calmly as if were standing on a stationary tower. Alex also showed me the steering wheel, so tiny that it was a quarter of the size of the steering wheel of my Suzuki. There were no paper charts but everything appears on electronic maps that can be read and modified at a moment's notice. Some reading show the depths of the ocean beneath us, another points out the latitude and longitude. He showed me an outline of the approach to our next port Acapulco, although their local knowledge is also enhanced by a local pilot who comes aboard at each port. I noticed an area in the port of Acapulco marked out as anchorage, but he explained that was merely a last resort, because the pier should be immediately available to us.  I asked how they prevent collision with whales. In the day they could normally spot a spout of water from a whale in time, but in any case whales would normally move away on hearing the ship's vibrations. But, he said, there was no mechanism that could signal their presence to them, especially in the dark. 

Fred Olsen Cruises were pleased with their gamble in organizing this 80 day tour, as they had the vessel at 70% capacity. This is good because there is always the problem of contagious dideases such as covid and norovirus. To combat that they need to have a sufficient number of empty cabin spaces in reserve.

I thanked him for the explanation and the tour. I posed for a photo with him and Sammie and even sat on the Captain's raised chair.

Back to reality and my cabin. During tea time we were delighted to find Sharon back, enjoying the freedom of eating in a public space, with Ranald. She had enjoyed her quarnatine in the luxury of a larger accomodation with a bath in which she soak herself. She was imppressed two by the number of drawers at her disposal. Our cabins have 9 drawers on Deck 6, but on Deck 3 they only have 3 drawers. In total she missed only one tour, in San Diego, and will be able to visit Acapulco tomorrow. We bought a couple of gifts for kack and Lyn in the shop on Deck 5. My old friend Shiri was there. She was very pleased she will be on an excursion tomorrow, observing the release of sea turtles. Albina also tried to buy me a pair of light coloured trousers, but they had nothing in my size.

The evening was a Formal Night again. I noticed that a number of older gentlemen who wore black dinner jackets on such occasions in the past, now switched to white jackets. What an extravagance. As Albina ws still not participating I put on a light coloured suit with a yellow tie, which looked just as good and seemed original. I attended a Guest Talent Show but only two songs were any good, as well as a cheeky irreverent poem recited from memory by Terry. The rest were mediocre and in the case of a limpid tango performance, pathetic. Still I had no close person performing so I could afford to chuckle. It was followed by a concert by songstress Lorraine Brown singing largely motown ballads and put in a lot of fire and passion in to her performance as well as some quirky humour. The quiz went badly as Ranald and Sharon obviously felt too worn out to turn up. We struggled on with Helen and Tony but ended up with 9 out of 15. It was frustrating really not knowing that Dutch is also an official language in Belgium, and not just Flemish and French, and that the second most populous country in the world is India, when I know that all serious commntators acknowledge that India has surpassed China's population in the last two years. Just life, I guess. 

Albina was happy to finally contact Sandro by phone in Finland.