30 June 2014; Ketchikan, Alaska.

After a very successful day in Glacier Bay, the Volendam turned south. As the visit to Marjorie Glacier is as far north as we go, from now on we are looking at southerly or south easterly courses to return to Vancouver. The distance to Ketchikan is such that the ship cannot make it during just a night sailing and arrive at 0800 for a normal port day. Therefore the arrival time has been set for 10 am.  Because we are there on a Monday we meet the north coming parade of Saturday ships.  As a result Ketchikan was full. All four berths were occupied with two big Princess ships and an NCL ship, sharing the same pier as we did, Berth 1, which is about as “downtown” as you can get.

As part of my mission to help with the alarm system roll out, I had the whole crew on the move today as there were two meetings in the show lounge, one of which each crew member had to attend. Most crew, somehow, always make it to the morning meeting and then the afternoon session is only for those who could not get away from work in the morning.  You would think that the crew would split themselves up in 2 halves to attend but that never happens. Ketchikan is home to a Wall-mart and that is a very powerful incentive to do one’s utmost to attend the morning meeting.

All crew meeting in the Frans Hals Lounge/ Showroom at Sea

We always hold these meetings  in port, as on a sea day it would affect the guest services too much with pulling the crew out. Hence today in Ketchikan it was all happening with two 30 minute sessions to enlighten the crew about the new enhancements coming. I say enhancements as it is just an improvement on the proven system that we already have. Ever since the Titanic there have been upgrades to the emergency drills on board ships and that process will never stops as long as new evidence and insights are coming along.

Apart from this all crew happening, there are breakouts with trainings for the various teams who perform various functions. Most functions do already exist but now they are formulized in a different way and specific crew members are assigned instead of what was more common in the past that any standby crewmember could be ordered to do the job.

One of those teams is the Official Document Securing Team. This is a group of crew members under the direction of the Purser who collects all passports, seaman’s book, important paperwork and the contents of the purser safe and then take it to the lifeboats.  The purser had since a long time been issued with bags for this purpose but there had never been a formulized approach for this issue. It had never been much of an issue. If a ship sank, shore side had plenty of time to sort things out, before the first survivors would reach land.

With the recent happening of the Costa Concordia this changed, as the survivors were ashore very quickly. Everybody was busy with saving lives but at the same time the authorities got a headache with 4000 people coming ashore without any I.D. Plus the hotel owners like to see people paying for the hotel once everything was done.  So it would make sense if the Purser would come ashore with all the passports and setup an emergency post to help identifying all those who came ashore. That would make the authorities very happy. Also if the crew could be issued with money for a Per Diem while ashore, that would make Restaurant, Hotel and Taxi owners also very happy. (As you can see even in an emergency it is our duty to make everybody happy)

The “Shopping Bags” of the Purser

Now we have an official solution for this logistical challenge and a new team has been setup officially. Duties were discussed, time frames were reviewed and for a medium ship as the Volendam it was estimated that about 15 overnight bags were needed to get it all in. That means 16 hands and thus 8 team members.  These 8 crew, will be the only ones who will arrive “with luggage” at the life raft station and will not be told to leave it all behind. And no doubt everybody will take extra good care of the purser as he/she will be carrying the most important bag of all………………………..

It might be a small detail to formulize something like this, but it does have a major impact once on the shore side.

Ketchikan offered a dry day, which is not that usual so all the more reason to be content with the visit. Tomorrow will be the last day of the cruise, with scenic sailing through the inside passage in the afternoon. Seymour Narrows slack tide is around 2100 and that means that the guests will be able to see the ship going through Discovery Pass, the narrowest passage of our whole cruise.