A Centurion of Sorts.

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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 70 celsius 2 feet off the ground. Don’t think I’ve ever sweat so much in my life. Probably drank a whole gallon of water/Gatorade that day. The same day we were in port with the Maltese Falcon. The most expensive sailing yacht ever built, it was even featured on 60 minutes a few years ago.

A couple cruises ago we broke the record for the most people ever on the Oasis. We call it the world record, but nobody has confirmed with the Allure (Oasis’ sister ship). But either way 8420 people onboard is a ton of people.

Because the Oasis has significantly different lifeboats than any other ship, all of the videos talking about the lifeboats ships in the fleet carry are invalid. So myself and the safety team came up with an idea for a new video. Coupled with the production team onboard, we filmed a new video that’s now airing on both the Oasis and Allure. It’s a pretty nice feeling that I’ve assisted in something that people will actually get to see.

Last cruise, the Chief Officer gave me a day off! I took my pick between St Thomas and St Maarten. Home to amazing beaches, and one of the greatest locations in the world for plane spotting caused St Maarten to come out on top. So I found a few people who wanted to go and see the same things and we rented a car. It was pretty nice to get behind the wheel again after 3 months. So we drove to the airport and saw some crazy landings, spent some time at the restaurant on the beach, and even drove to France! The airport was incredible, because the runway is so short planes get as low as possible before over the strip so they can use the entire length. This also means that planes taking off get right to the end of the runway before spoiling up their engines to take off under full thrust. The biggest issue this causes is that it sandblasts everyone behind the plane and blows everyone off the beach.

We had an awesome party on the mooring deck! There was even a live band playing the music for karaoke. I found some lyrics, then we had the chief officer on drums, and the chief safety playing guitar and we had the best mooring deck version of Hotel California ever!

Yesterday while we were in Labadee we had to medeivac somebody. Although I had seen this once before while on the Independence, that was in the middle of the night and the pilot didn’t land. So it was super cool to see a helicopter on the bow!

So life is generally good; my only complaints at the time being are that spending 4 more months here will cause things to get pretty stale and my National Geographic that I had forwarded here haven’t show up at all… I just finished writing the company Navigation Policy and Procedures exam. I passed, but it was far from easy. And what made it worse was how wordy the questions were, I feel bad for the people taking it who aren’t native English speakers. But that asides, I’m quite looking forward to September. Turns out my Grandma and Aunt are going to come cruise with me, and it’s the week I have my birthday! Should be good times.

As always, comments and emails at gbeier@gmail.com are always appreciated. Mailing address available by request.

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