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.

Life Aboard: International Theater Jargon

Here on the Golden Princess, we’re in the middle of a show install for a new production show. Head office sent out a lighting tech a month in advance, to get the plot rehung and get all the additions and changes squared away. A couple weeks ago another lighting tech got on, to do some reprogramming and some video set-up. That makes three lighting techs on board, and we’re from three different nationalities. We’re Canadian, English and American. And we speak three different languages.

We’re all experienced lighting technicians, but every day we work together, we find some differences in how we do things. Things are done differently in different theaters on the same block, so it’s no surprise that things are done different across international borders. The biggest difference is language.

There are the inevitable pronunciation differences from the three countries, which we all acknowledge, and constantly make fun of each other for. Then there are the turns of phrase and the idioms unique to each country. These are fun to adopt. Then there are the completely indecipherable differences. They make work difficult.

A good example is when the British lighting tech found out (as if it were a big secret) that the correct way to say the word mauve is with the same vowel sound as in caught. He pronounces it mOv, like stove. Wrong.

That was a high point of contention, until we got to soldering. Then he had bigger battles to fight.

It’s been a cross-cultural learning experience. And not just in the theater.

Life Aboard: The Food

The food here is not as spectacular as one might imagine. Yeah, everyone goes on a cruise ship to eat. But you don’t work on a cruise ship to eat.

There is always a variety of food available (24 hours a day). There are the unhealthy options of cheeseburgers and fries, pizza and dessert, but there are always healthy options too. Your diet depends on what you choose.

The average passenger will gain 1-2 pounds per day of the cruise.

The thing to avoid with the food is excess. The plates they make available are twice as big as normal plates. The buffet line stretches on and on. The dessert server encourages you to take another piece of pie. The mess has entrees and buffets available.

But once you step back and realize that the food’s not going away, and you’ll see the same menu or layout in two weeks time, it’s easy to eat manageable portions.

There are a variety of dining options for the crew on board. The complicated part is remembering when you’re allowed to go to which. The crew mess is always open, the staff mess is sometimes open, the officer’s mess is occasionally open, with service at certain times. The passenger buffet is open all the time, but it’s only available at certain specific hours during sea days, and different specific hours during port days. Or not at all when it’s busy. The pizza place is usually open, except on certain port or sea days. Same with the hamburger grill. The panini shop is always not available, except to contractors on the crew, who have passenger privileges. The steakhouse and trattoria are available through reservation. And I still haven’t learned when the sushi bar is open or available.

Life Aboard: Plowing through Time Zones

Our home port is Los Angeles, then we head to the Hawaiian islands for four days. The Hawaiian islands are 3 hours different from LA, at this time of year, since they don’t change their clocks for daylight savings time. There’s a one-hour difference off the coast of California, as we enter Alaska Daylight Time. There are no time zones between Alaska Daylight and Hawaiian Standard. So we make them up.

In the four-day voyage between California and Hawaii, we change the clocks one hour every other day. Going to Hawaii, we get one more hour of sleep every other day.

Coming back, we lose one.

It’s a gauntlet of long days whose nights actually do get shorter. It’s not just our imagination.

Life Aboard: Work

Who knew working on cruise ships is super busy? Well, if I had stopped to think about it, they have to get the most out of their crew, since they don't want people just taking up space. The vessel is foreign-flagged, so American Unions have nothing to do with the ship. There are no strict rules about who can do which tasks. Everyone lends a hand and does whatever needs doing.

I pulled a 12 hour day today, and a 15 hour day yesterday. Tomorrow I get to sleep in until 9am, and we're not going through a time zone so we don't lose an hour. That's almost too easy.

I had an 8-hour work day a few days in a row, when I was able to get off and see a bit of Hawaii. That felt like a day off. Until I counted my hours and realized I worked a full day.

We count our hours here to make sure no one is overworked (minimum 10 hours of rest in any 24 hour period, minimum of a 6-hour continuous break every 24 hours). If not for that, I think the days would run by in a blurry haze. Now I can keep track of the hours ticking by.

I enjoy being busy, but I especially enjoy working on a project. Luckily, I've found myself in the middle of an install, which is a huge overarching project for the next couple of months. That gives shipboard projects a nice context, as I do maintenance, program smaller shows and remount a show from last season.

Work work work.