Sea Sick... SO Sea Sick...

Last night we had some really rough sea conditions. Waves were about 25' and the whole ship rocked violetly from 3pm until 5am this morning. Needless to say, I now know that I infact do NOT have my sea legs yet. After rehearsal (around 4:30pm), I immediately went to my room where I proceeded to vomit/dry heave until about 9pm. During some heaving intermission, I called the AV Manager - Mike - and asked him to run the shows that night, and called Sue - the Cruise Director - to let her know I would not be in that evening. I passed out sometime around 10pm, only to be awoken at 1am by the sound of tens of thousands of pounds of chain doing what sounded like falling down a staircase. Apparently that's what the ship's emergency anchor sounds like.

Whenever you pull into a port, you embark someone called a Pilot who is very familiar with the channels and underweater terrain and can safely lead your vehicle into the port. Normally the pilot is in a speedboat that pulls up next to the ship, we open an exterior door, lower a ladder, and he climbs onboard. Well, with 25' waves that simply cannot happen. So we had to drop anchor at 2am in the middle of the channel, so the Pilot could be flown in on a helicopter and land on our helipad.

After all of that the city would not let us enter the canal because it was too dangerous and the odds of damaging the canal were just as high as the odds of damaging the ship. So we had to drop anchor yet again. Normally we pull into Amsterdam at about 4:30 in the morning, but today we did not get here until 8:30am. Several guests with early flights missed them, and the turnaround time from disembarking in the morning to embarking in the afternoon got cut down from 6 hours to 3 hours, so everyone was stressed to the max. In the end, we sailed out of Amsterdam on time - and everyone seems to have survived. The housekeeping staff looks a little worse for the wear, but embark day is always rough on them no matter what.

To me the worst job onboard is being assigned to luggage duty. Housekeepers and stateroom attendants literally start hauling luggage at 9pm the night before disembarkation day, finish getting luggage off the ship by 8am, and start hauling new luggage in immedaitely - a process that usually lasts until 8pm. I would probably kill myself if I had to do that.

By the next morning I was pretty much back to normal. We were at port so the ship was rocking only slightly because it is physically chained and tied to the dockside.

Apparently, in my absence, the show last night was a complete mess. It was the "EVERYTHING MUSICAL" show where all of the lounge acts come onstage and do one number, sort of as a farewell to all of the guests. The band master had distributed the wrong show time to his staff, so the show started with no bass guitar. We had to rearrange the order of the acts because one group didn't show up in time. The strings trio comes out from the trap room, but Sue had forgotten, and was introducing them while standing on the pit lifts, so we were unable to send them down to put the musicians on. One of the cast members tripped when the ship rocked, and started laughing so loud she totally flopped her solo... It was just a mess.

But in a weird way, that horrible show is the best job security I could ever ask for.