You work all day every day, spend a few hours ashore once in a while, and the next thing you know another month has gone by! The last month has been one of the more interesting onboard actually. A week after my last blog update was Halloween. Now being onboard this ship was surprisingly interesting. The creativity of the crew was astounding, and the guest participation was amazing. The promenade deck was packed with a few thousand costumed guests all dancing to the monster mash right up until Thriller started playing… This caused nearly 50 crew members all zombified to appear out of what seemed like thin air and then be joined by the cruise director filling in for Michael Jackson. Seeing 50 crew members all do the Thriller dance amongst a promenade covered in spider ... read more

Where to start, where to start… It’s been nearly a month since I’ve posted a blog and I’m still finding it hard to have an interesting posting. But here goes It seems like every other week there is a tropical disturbance that we end up having to avoid, even last week we did a backwards cruise so that a storm would pass by us. This week is looking perfect, but next week might be yet another reroute. Because we did a backward cruise, we were in Nassau at a completely different time of day as we usually are. This meant that instead of showing up at 6 in the morning, having a drill, and then leaving at 2 pm. We arrived at 1pm and left that evening at 7. This allowed me to go to the ... read more

Hello hello, I’ve now been onboard the Oasis for 100 days. Which means that coupled with my seatime on the Independence, I only have 132 more days until I’m finished on the Oasis. But more importantly, I’ll be finished as a cadet forever! Life here is interesting as always. Seems that every day offers something completely different. Last week in Fort Lauderdale I went with one of the fire teams to a marine fire school. It was a fantastic learning experience! We coupled search and rescue with fire fighting in enclosed spaces, so it was even more hands on than the last time I went to fire school. The only bad part about it was the weather. 38 celsius out and horribly humid outside the burn box, but inside with the fire burning the temperature hit ... read more

First things first; Sorry that it’s been ages since my last blog. I promise that this one is going to make up for it. Of the people that email me, most of them ask me what the craziest thing that I’ve done so far is, and normally I really have to scratch my head to think up something. But I can outright say that it’s now a no brainer. Last week the Captain let me take the control of the vessel coming into port when we stopped at St Thomas! Although officially he still had the control as I don’t have a license, I was making the wheel orders. Last year on the Independence I was at the wheel quite often, but that meant I was taking wheel orders from someone else. Being the person giving ... read more

I’ve been onboard for a couple weeks now and figured it was time for an update. Getting to Miami was crazy, the flight had a layover in Dallas (which is a really nice airport btw). But American Airlines is the worst airline in the world; I had to pay for my luggage, no food on the plane (included or to buy), and for some reason the airline decided to delay my connecting flight to wait for all the other late planes to arrive and the people to get onboard. As my flight to Dallas was early, and the connector was late I ended up being in the airport for 6 hours, and stuck on the tarmac for another 2… The only good thing about this whole experience was an incredible display of lightning we flew past. ... read more