Big staff changeover

Today marks the start of what I expect to be the busiest month of my contract.  Due to an unfortunate alignment of several production staff contracts, more than half of our 15 staff (8 of them) have left or will leave by Feb. 23.  This includes both of the other Studio B stage staff, the Studio B production manager, and the Studio B sound technician, in addition to several people from the theatre.  Both of the incoming stage staff in Studio B are new hires so I expect it to be busy for me, being the only person with all the know-how of how we operate.  Today we're in St. Thomas and those two studio B stage staff have supposedly already signed-on to the ship, which is lucky for us I suppose because we were only expecting one to come onboard today.   This means Leslie the current stage staff who is leaving in February, will be able to train his replacement before leaving.  That should make things a little easier on me.

Our first cruise after dry-dock went exceptionally well in my opinion.  Dry-dock is a big job and gets everyone out of their usual routine and instead doing work that is often more physically demanding and exhausting.  Given that scenario, it's easy to expect that the first cruise after dry-dock might not go so smoothly if the crew are all tired out and maybe not up to their usual standard.  Our crew ranked very high in guest satisfaction in 2009 though so I suspect that had to do with the first post dry-dock cruise going smoothly.  If you have a great team to start with, they will usually still come across at least as a "good" team when they're worn out.

I also found out this week that my contract may not be as long as I was expecting.  My original contract had a projected sign-off date of April 24, 2010 but since my replacement is coming on April 10 (and he has worked in B on Explorer before), I will probably sign off on that day.  Great news for me... except that it really puts the pressure on to get my lighting experience in a shorter period of time if I still hope to be promoted to lighting tech.

Well, that's about all for today.  I need to get out and enjoy sunny St. Thomas (after 6 exhausting sea days).

Dry-dock: Dock Tour

This was something that no passenger could pay any amount of money to get, it’s crew-only and that’s all there is to it.  Whether or not we would even get a dock tour was still undecided right until the last day of dry-dock.  Management had said they would try to get us a tour but obviously as there are so many unknowns during dry-dock, it could not be guaranteed.  The main thing naturally was that most of the work on the hull of the ship would have to be near complete so that we could be down there and not get in the way of dockyard workers and vehicles.  Well, on the last day of dry-dock the call came at 2:30pm that if we went down to the guest relations desk at 3pm, we could have a dock tour.
We were required to wear hard hats and safety goggles for the tour and were escorted down the long staircase from the top of the dock to the bottom.  The staircase is on the exterior of the dock and the drop is about 40 feet down.   The tour was conducted by the first officer and we were given a thorough tour all the way around the bottom of the ship and were encouraged to bring our cameras to take photos.  Since it was the last day, almost the entire hull had been cleaned and re-painted.  We got a chance to get up close and personal, including walking right underneath the ship.  This was definitely the highlight of being in dry-dock for me, and absolutely something you don’t see every day.
Click View Full Album below to view the photos from the dry-dock tour.

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Dry-dock

I’m not sure whether to consider myself lucky or unlucky to have a dry-dock during my first contract.  It’s definitely good experience to have but it’s also a lot of work.  For anyone who doesn’t already know, dry-dock is when the ship is removed from the water for a period of time for maintenance of the hull, propellers, and anything else under the waterline.  Of course since we don’t carry passengers to dry-dock, we are also able to carry out a wide variety of maintenance in all areas of the ship.  There are many things that ships go through every dry-dock such as replacing carpet, re-upholstering furniture, and re-finishing wood surfaces. We left Bayonne on January 3rd as early as possible, as I recall about 11:30am and arrived in Freeport, Bahamas 2 days later at roughly the same time.  There was some wind which delayed the process but we were into the dock by about 1:30pm.  Next the position of the ship was fine-tuned and then we started to come out of the water.  There is an interesting tidbit about the Freeport dry-docks that I didn’t really realize before we arrived. 

New Years on Explorer of the Seas

It was an adventure getting set up for new years’ eve on Explorer, which started on Dec. 30th when nearly the entire cruise division (approximately 100 people) gathered in Studio B to start blowing up balloons.  A number of passengers asked me how many balloons we put in the balloon drops.  I didn’t have an answer then and I don’t have an answer now.  It was a LOT.  100 people equipped with 32 diving tanks full of air, an air compressor, and a connection to the ships air can churn out an astounding number of balloons in a short period of time.  To put it simply, I left Studio B for 8 minutes to take care of something else.  Upon my arrival, the entire floor of Studio B was covered with balloons (the floor was brought on, covering the ice).  Those balloons were then put in large balloon drops (nets, basically) and we spent the rest of the day hanging them.
New Years on any voyager-class ship is a busy time, and this cruise on Explorer was no exception.  The photo to the left shows the crowd at about 11:25pm.  By midnight, the whole promenade was overflowing with guests.  The large balloon drop at the top of the photo is actually a pool net which we filled with balloons.  I was one of two people tasked to drop the balloons at midnight.  I’m really glad there was an alternate crew-only route to get from where I took this photo to where I had to stand to pull the rope or I might not have gotten there at all.
Then of course we had a crew party in the back deck with drinks supplied by the ship.  I stopped by just after 12:30 but then had to go help remove the balloon drops from the ceiling of the Royal Promenade.  It took a while and when everything was packed up, a few of us stage staff decided to head back to the crew party, uniform and all.  It had been such a long day that none of us really felt like getting dressed for the occasion.  It was a fun evening though after the work was finished.

The Royal Promenade, Just after Midnight

Taking down the balloon drop at 2am