Life Aboard: Guest Entertainers

One thing that I didn’t quite realize when I got onboard was that there is live entertainment every single night of every single cruise. I didn’t really think about it, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise. The other thing that I didn’t quite realize was that no one else can run the lighting rig. No one else even knows how to turn it on. Now, combine live entertainment every night with no one else doing lights. Live entertainment requires lights. I’m required if lights are required. Hence, I will be working every single night of every single cruise for my entire contract.

These two realizations came quite early to me, since these facts were introduced to me my first day aboard. The full implications haven’t really settled in until now, though. A few months in, I’ve worked every single night for the last two and a half months. And now I realize that I’m not even half done, and I’ll be working every night for the next 4 months. Oh.

It’s not a daunting concept, it’s just my job. It makes me feel proud. I’m a professional. These guest entertainers, whose job it is to fly around to cruise ships and set up their act in mere hours, come in to the theater and start interacting with us. It’s all very professiona

l, and they ask for some special effects or some specific looks, and we can deliver. We’re professional entertainers. I’m a professional lighting operator, capable of programming a vast variety of effects at the drop of a hat.

For example, a couple nights ago, 10 minutes before a show, a guest entertainer calls up to the booth, from backstage, and requests a red wash with enough front light to not need follow spots. He told me what he was wearing, and then he moved on to sound requests. Enough information given. I programmed the show in blind right then and there, cleaned up the transitions, and started the show.

Some of our guest entertainers’ acts are more lighting-intensive than others. Some want talk washes for the whole hour-long show. Some have their own show discs that need to be repatched and focused to fit our rig. Some just have a list of songs that they might or might not do and I need to light their whole act. This last type of entertainer is the most time consuming. Sometimes I’ll program their show the night before, sometimes during the day of the show, sometimes I’ll adapt another entertainer’s show from a previous cruise during sound check.

As I get more familiar with the rig, and more comfortable with the control board, I cut down on programming time and do more impressive stuff. It’s quite fun to sit back and just look at what I’ve done. I’ve never run a rig this extensive and expensive before.

Scooting around Kauai

After the installation of British Invasion was complete, I had plenty of time on my hands. Now I can start to enjoy the regular schedule of working on a cruise ship. My first two months were anomalous.

A regular schedule means being able to get off in port. Except for the aforementioned In-Port Manning days, when maintenance and laundry are done, I have port days off. There’s always evening entertainment, but it’s usually after we’ve sailed. So I get a day in the Hawaiian Islands.

This Nawiliwili, on the island of Kauai, I rented scooters with a couple friends. I ran into them in the little shopping center right off the ship, and with nothing else to do, I decided to accompany them on a scooter adventure. Why not.

Our little scooters were pretty awesome. They were easy to ride, easy to control and went pretty quickly. On the downhills we could get up to 50 mph. The roads on Kauai are pretty friendly, with only one highway, with a usual speed limit of 40. The country roads have speed limits of 25. We felt very safe along the roads, and only got yelled at a couple times by passing motorists.

We drove around the area heading to some waterfalls and scenic drives. We went up the Wailua River, saw some waterfalls from a distance, looked over the royal valley of Kauai and visited some ruins of temples. We puttered around inland to an arboretum, heading to the end of the road, where the river washed over the pavement. We headed back to a beach for a quick dip in the water, since it was a hot day. We went to Lydgate Park, a beach that I had visited as a kid. It has an amazing playground, which we did not explore, and a sheltered cove with good snorkeling, which we did explore, briefly.

After a quick stop at the beach, we headed to a secluded waterfall and swimming hole that the scooter rental guy had told us about. After getting turned around, thanks to our low quality map, we followed a local to the right place. We hiked down to the falls, which were completely deserted. We had a few minutes to ourselves to contemplate the 20+ foot drop and rope swing before other people made their way down. They had been there before and assured us that the bottom was very deep and it was safe to jump. So jump we did.

It was my first time jumping off a cliff. I’ve fallen off one (a small one on Vieques in Puerto Rico), and jumped off a ladder partway up a waterfall (in Israel), but I have never before stood on top of a cliff, with a stream falling away next to me, looking down at an indistinctly-far-away pool and jumped. When I went, the fall was long enough to give an experience of falling. Not just a brief sensation that you get when diving into a pool, or jumping off an 8’ platform in the theater. Not the sensation from a really high bounce on a trampoline. Something distinctly different. You’re in a different level of gravity as the structures holding your insides no longer take weight. Free fall. And then it was gone. Such a brief experience, but something completely different.

We were getting close to the crew all-aboard time, so we had to leave the falls before we would have liked, then scoot back to the rental place. We made it aboard with time to spare, after a wonderful tour of the southwest corner of Kauai.

Life Aboard: In Port Manning

In every port, the ship needs a minimum number of crew onboard in case of emergency. The duty of staying onboard rotates through the crew by department. Each department is responsible for a certain number of crew members onboard. This rotation is called in-port manning.

Once or twice per 14-day itinerary, I have IPM duty. With the install going on, I hardly notice when I’m allowed to get off or not. Once the install is over, it will be more relevant, but there is always maintenance to be done. I'm visiting the same itinerary for 6 months. If I don't see Hawaii this time around, I'll see it next week.