Sailing the Georgia Strait
The previous entry is Vancouver.
May 30
The passage from Vancouver to Ketchikan on the southeastern tip of Alaska takes more than 24 hours, so the first day on the ship was a day at sea. We spent the morning exploring the ship: the round-the-clock food is on the Lido Deck, the gym is on the Sports Deck, the Casino is next to the Library, you can walk around the ship on the Promenade Deck (“No jogging!”), and so on. Way up on top is the Crows Nest Lounge, overlooks the ship’s prow. It’s sort of like Ten Forward on ST:TNG, but with larger wrap-around windows and better chairs. There’s an open-air observation deck above this lounge, but, when the ship is underway, the wind can be a bit much.
This was also the only day we went to the onboard gym for a little bit of time on the elliptical machine.
One of the apparent maritime regulations for this course is to have a pilot ship guide the cruise ship through the Georgia Strait into open seas just south of the border with Alaska. The pilot ship kept with us in the morning, but I don’t recall seeing it again after we passed the Strait.
We weren’t in the middle of the ocean — there was land to starboard (mnemonic: port has four letters like left) — but the ship actually did begin to roll with the current. A complimentary brunch up in the Crow’s Nest (part of the whole fancier stateroom thing) got cut a bit short because this was high in the ship, and seemed to roll more for that reason. I was getting a bit sea sick and had to pop a Dramamine and take a nap. I actually had to take a second one a bit before dinner.
A note on cruise ship dinners: you’re assigned a table number and typically dine with other passengers. These other passengers will be with you the whole week, more or less, unless you ask to be switched. The ship also offers a more typical restaurant, where you make reservations to dine more privately, on supposedly fancier food (We splurged on Lumiere in Vancouver, and felt no need to eat there). A third option is to eat buffet-style in the Lido Deck restaurant, but this tends to be steam-tray stuff. Good stuff, but steam-tray nonetheless.
The other groups at our table were a mother and son from San Antonio (the son ducked out of dinner every other night because the Western Conference finals were on TV), a retired couple who left after the first night to be replaced by a different retired couple from Florida (whose backyard got trashed by hurricanes last year every month or so), and a younger couple from Lexington, KY (the wife, we found out a couple days later, is actually a recent med school graduate, and this was the post-Match vacation). It should be noted that the vast majority of cruise passengers are older; later, on our overland tour, Grace and I were the youngest people on the bus. I suppose it bucked the odds that half our dinner table was relatively young. The older people at our table had also been on a number of cruises before, though mainly Caribbean ones. The woman from Texas had cruised to Alaska, though not all the way up to Seward/Anchorage.
Dinner itself was the usual sequence of appetizer, entree and dessert, with a different menu each night (though, this being an Alaskan cruise, salmon in various guises was on every menu). The food was good in the fine restaurant sense and with restaurant cliches: vertically stacked food presentations, drizzled with oil infusions. Cruise ships are basically fancy mobile hotels with attached restaurants, after all. I recall a few things didn’t hit right, mainly having to do with unexpectedly canned fruit on desserts, but there was no opportunity to go hungry, in particular on fish.
The ship also designates certain dining room nights to be “casual” and “formal” in terms of dress. “Casual” means any type of clothing. “Formal” is when you have to wear a suit — it might be called “business attire” on shore — though a few people were wearing tuxedoes. There’s a third type between these two whose name I can’t remember, but I couldn’t really tell the difference between it and “casual”, probably because we weren’t on a tropical cruise and passengers didn’t wear shorts all the time. If you haven’t brought nice clothing aboard, you’d eat in the Lido restaurant on formal nights.
On Formal nights, part of the ship’s crew dines with the guests. At our table, we got the Environmental Officer. He had an accent — he’s Belgian — and I didn’t catch all of what he said, but for the most part he told stories about his times serving on cargo ships and complaining about his tiny, windowless office in the bowels of the ship. “Environmental Officer” is also apparently a new-ish post, the cruise company having created it after some mishaps elsewhere. US regulations may also be stricter than elsewhere, especially sailing in Alaska.
Note that the ship’s visible crew breakdown looks roughly like this: you have Indonesians as the waiters and stewards, Filipinos as the hotel staff, and European/Dutch officers commanding the ship. Given the nature of cruise ships, I’m not sure who’s more important to the company, the ship’s captain or the hotel director. We’d find out later that, for the hotel and restaurant staff, on our end-of-cruise survey, employees had to score at least an 8.5 on a scale of 0 through 9 to keep from being sent home. During dinner on the next-to-last night, they’d remind us to give them 9s on our evaluations.
The hotel staff was actually more attentive than any other hotel staff I’d seen. They’d actually turn out the cabin twice a day, making the bed, putting in fresh towels, restocking the fruit basket, and picking up after us in general. This happened in the late morning and during dinner. The staff-to-guest ratio must be remarkable to pull this off. Note that all the cabins are turned out and cleaned entirely at the end of the cruise: the ship arrives at 6AM and new guests come aboard at around 3PM. I’m not sure if the twice-a-day turn out service is a benefit of having the sufficiently large crew needed to do everything in the tight timeframe of embarkation days (“the crew stays on the ship, so let’s have them do something during the cruise”), or if it’s a goal onto itself. Probably a bit of both. The restaurants work similarly, doing breakfast, lunch and two dinner seatings (with 400 or 500 meals each seating, all served relatively quickly). The infrastructure needed to provide this level of service is impressive: after all, the hotel and restaurant components of the ship would be gigantic compared to any regular hotel or restaurant.
There weren’t many pictures taken and kept during this part of the trip, but here they are:
The next entry is Ketchikan.