After the disappointment of leaving the wonderful port of San Francisco behind it's time to get on with the job in hand. Up until now this blog has mostly been about my time on board in the capacity as a guest, enjoying ports at my leisure. Having returned to crew and after a period of engaging my head back into work mode it's time to get on with the actual job of living and working at sea and delivering what I signed up to.
So it's a four day sailing west towards Hawaii!
It's not all about simply sitting around and waiting for the bridge officers to steer us there, our technical team to propel us there whilst keeping the lights on and the IT working. Or indeed the housekeeping team maintaining the quality of the ships cabins, public and crew areas to the standard everyone expects, or our chefs keeping all 4500 of us fed! Our entertainment teams keeping everyone........ Entertained. The plumbers plumbing, the carpenters 'carpenting?', the laundry 'laundering'. Our amazing medics continue to be on hand 24/7 to provide care for those who may need it. It's a whole world with everyone keeping everyone safe and happy until our next port of call.
There is a whole raft of work continually going on. The ship continues to hum, everyone cracking on keeping our world turning!!
Safety is paramount as you would hope. This afternoon saw a heli-ops drill. The ship exercises emergency response regularly. Heli-ops is almost exclusively reserved for the times when someone needs to medically disembarked and when a helicopter is the only means of transport. There's inherent risks associated to a moving, rolling, pitching vessel and a helicopter!!! As such, this afternoon we exercised the response to a helicopter having crashed on deck. Not a scenario we'd ever wish for but one we must train for. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!
Now that we're back at sea and continuing on the world voyage there's the inevitable but exhausting time changes!!
Not something to be taken lightly I may add! Transatlantic crossings are painful as you encounter 10 time changes in a two week period as we head West and East between New York and Southampton. New York feels like an eternity ago and we've moved west ever since!
I'm writing this from the past. I'm 8 hours behind my UK based loved ones and tonight we go back another hour. This can make communication harder as it's so easy to forget that an opportunity to say hi has slipped by. Don't even get me started on February 24th!!!
Feb 24th won't even exist, we'll just skip straight through it.
I'm still struggling with this concept and I'll cover it in a future blog once I wrap my head round the concept. But yes, that day will cease to exist in my world. I'll leave you to conjure with that one
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