Easter Island GPS Track & Lost at Sea - III

Documenting the Easter Island Circumnavigation

 

The GPS track of the ship’s route is above for those interested in our circumnavigation of Easter Island. For all it’s worth, the more the other guests got grumpy yesterday about the boat (albeit a very big boat) tour of Easter Island and its maoi, the more I got in a good mood. The day was fantastic, and I suppose I got to see enough of the place that with the narration for the two ship’s lecturers I felt that I had really been there. Setting foot on land would have been nice, but many of us would have been happy with a seaward excursion had it been offered as the alternative to a long dusty bus ride.

 

Persona du Bateau

 

Also we sailed around Easter Island I became aware that a rumor is going around the ship that I am a professional reporter who is writing an article about this cruise. I didn’t believe this until a guest who I have not met before came over to me and told me that the wrong salad dressing was on their salad at last night’s dinner and proceeded to spell their first and last name slowly.

 

Of course, my dinner with the Hotel Director a few nights ago may have had something to do with my new persona du bateau. Michele is a 47 year old Napolitano who was running the Silver Whisper last February on my cruise from Sydney to Hong Kong. We had planned to have dinner then, and it finally was able to get scheduled on this cruise. The HD is in a way at the same level of management as the captain and of course has a much larger staff. He runs the operation of the cruise ship, although the captain gets to move it around on a frequent basis. With some thought it is easy to understand how the duties of these two “bosses” divide and they don’t seem to need to spend much time with each other.

 

We hit it off quite well and had a fantastic dinner. (Do you think that maybe the chef made some extra care in the food for us?) I spent some time before the dinner thinking about how not to say anything that might sound like a complaint, and certainly not to mention any individual or anything that might be traced to any individual. It was a social dinner with a kind of business slant, with him getting my opinion from a perhaps educated if not process oriented point of view and he enlightening me about a profession that I have no knowledge of. We also shared personal “life stories” and drank a lot of very nice wine. Michele is recovering from a painful divorce, and that came up. I was honored that he chose me to dine with. His pager only went off once during the dinner. Something about “a hose breaking.” I’m sure his interest probably had to do more with a guest possibly getting hurt or the cleanup of the carpet. The Captain (actually Staff Captain) would be more concerned with actually fixing said hose. See how this works?

 

As luck would have it, the Tour Desk Manager of the previous two cruise segments did come up. Actually, the Hotel Director brought it up. (It was in the section of the dinner conversation titled, “Boy, do I get a long queue of guests at my office when someone screws up.”) I politely asked how this guy would be viewed for future cruise assignments with Silversea. The answer was one word: “Finito”. I guess the white rabbit is permanently down the rabbit hole. I have to admit I asked a Head Waiter who was the only countryman of the ex-Tour Manager a few nights later if the guy who is now gone had some personal problems that would have generated such poor performance. The response was, “Colombia has many GOOD things. Don’t be discouraged.” As I said, it’s a very personal experience on a small ship, and I have lots of friends on the crew.

 

In the Middle of the Ocean

 

I suspect that a great deal of folks who have not done ocean crossings feel that the deep ocean affects shipboard comfort in an, uh, adverse way. Yes the ocean is miles deep here and we are very far from land, but of course only the first 20 feet of so of the water matters to this ship. More water below the keel is of marginal interest. Storms near shore can be a lot more troublesome, and ships in general often leave port to “weather the storm” at sea rather than take a chance being battered by the dock or snapping the lines and drifting into say a gasoline tanker. The cruise lines usually plan the routes across the ocean to avoid the latitudes of possible storms. Equatorial cruises mostly experience no weather at all, doldrums being what they are. Itineraries that cross the North Atlantic in winter, for example, are an exception as are Caribbean cruises in September or October. There’s a reason such trips are heavily discounted: most experienced travelers should know better than to book a heavily discounted cruise. It’s like paying to see the “best ballerina from Romania”, say. Ya get what you pay for when the itinerary is cheap and sometimes a lot more than you wanted.

 

The discussion above seemed appropriate to be included here because of the few incidences of my mentioning “swells” and “listing” and “sea water streaming into the ship”, “coffee flying out of cups”, “small tables rolling across the room”, etc. Stuff like that. Perhaps I exaggerated. Me? In reality it should be understood that this is a big hotel that does float, but it’s a big hotel that is 610 feet long and weighs almost 30,000 tons. (Of course, most Hiltons for example are not weighed as a rule.) It would be impossible to run a huge kitchen, multiple restaurants, a theater, conference rooms, and all the business offices of a ship (or a hotel) if the darn thing kept tilting over and bouncing up and down to a great extent. Yes, there is some movement from time to time, but 99% of the time if there is noticeable movement it is very slow and you have to look for it—by sighting against a railing or windowsill—and most of the time there is no perceivable feeling of motion. This is what you would expect of a hotel, and that is the experience just about all the time. People do have stories of rough days at sea, and it does happen of course. In almost two years worth of traveling on smallish cruise ships, I have experienced about three days where I’ve rather been on land. But all the other times that motion was felt it was subtle and not at all anything like that of a car, train, or anything smaller than a very large building. This is a hotel after all.

 

OK, you want to know about waves and swells. It’s the latter that I’ve mentioned from time to time, you might have noted. Waves are caused by the wind. They are generally very short period: that is close together. They’re the things that develop whitecaps when it’s windy and might spray the rich but cheap folks on the lower decks who insist on sitting on their verandas on windy days. Waves are not usually an issue for big ships. They cut right through them. The swell, however, is much more interesting. Swells are caused by storms thousands (!) of miles away. This part of the Pacific is known for as a high swell area because of the typhoons in the Oriental waters this time of year. My oceanography friends (?) explain how the propagation of waves from far away bunch up as they propagate from afar to form the swell, and problems can develop when the local waves and a large swell are at crossed directions of course. But at any rate, the swell is very long period, up to 100s of feet apart but can be quite high. It’s swell that makes ships slowly pitch up and down. (Rolling isn’t a problem with modern stabilizers. That’s a good thing, of course.) You might notice the swell—currently I estimate at 10 feet peak to trough—and the almost nonexistent waves in the above picture I am about to take from the bow and will include above. We are truly in the middle of the ocean now, 26.5S 116.5W. Look on the globe. We’re about a third of the way from Easter Island to Pitcairn Island. That’s the middle of the ocean by anyone’s measure. Right? The GPS trace on the in room TVs show a pulsating circle with only blue for the entire screen. (Note the distortion on the HDTV 16:9 aspect ratio set showing a 4:3 picture on ALMOST EVERY CHANNEL FOR THE LAST 5 WEEKS. (But this is not bothering me, the TV distortion freak that I am, see.) The weather is clear now, the wind light, temperature at 9 am MDT (same time zone for today only as Boulder) is 70 degrees with highs expected about 80. Water temperature is about 72 or so I estimate. It is a glorious day as it almost always is in the “middle of the ocean.” Oh yes, this hotel bobbed like a cork for a few moments as we entered a few ports in Peru and Chile, but it was a fun E-ticket ride as long as you held on. It is not like that at sea, and most generally on the high seas. Again, the rich folks who book the suites on Deck 9 at the bow may have their designer luggage roll in and out from under their beds, but high and forward is not the best place on a pitching ship. The very very rich are not like you or I. Those of us who think about it book cabins amidships and low. So there.

 

 

Galley lunch today. I won’t hug the new pastry chef for making my lactose free chocolate desserts. He’s a tall guy with a mustache. It was a lot more fun with Annemarie, but she left in Valparaiso. I’m ready to come home. I miss everyone and a “real” life, such as it is.