Cruise Day Ten: Captain Jolly

The first day at sea, between Cadiz and Madeira, passed pretty uneventfully. I finished Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (thanks, Phil and Amelia, for recommending it; although it took me forever to get past page 25, after that it was pretty smooth sailing and it really is a thoughtful book for fantasy/sci fi) and started Alasdair Gray's Old Men in Love, which I'd really been looking forward to and which has repaid my confidence. Marjorie and I spent a good portion of the day on the sun deck reading. We both worked out as well. Not really exciting.

Now it is time to talk about the norovirus we've had on board and the man we associate with it, whom we call Captain Jolly. For those who didn't actually grow up in my household, the real Captain Jolly was the host of the nightly Popeye cartoons on Channel 9 in Windsor, Ontario, which started at the same time as dinnertime every night, and let to the one word phrase "Kweeeatintheden?" by my brother and me.

Here is a link to an article about the real Captain Jolly.

This Captain Jolly, on the other hand, is meant quite ironically. The captain of this ship, Tony Herriott (presumably no relation to Jim), has the most sonorous, serious voice imaginable.



Three days into the cruise, he came onto the "can't shut it off" PA that comes directly into your room, and told us, in a performance that so clearly had been (a) vetted by the Princess Lines lawyers; and (b) written down and he was told not to vary so much as an adverb, that the ship had passed the CDC's threshold for norovirus epidemics. The CDC's threshold is eight cases, no matter what the size of ship and no matter how long the voyage. Our ship holds 2500 passengers, and nearly as many crew. There are probably eight cases of norovirus going on in a similarly-sized office building at any time, but the CDC doesn't care that people are coming into work sick. It does care about cruise ships, because it has jurisdiction over them.

At the same time as Captain Jolly delivered the happy news, a written medical advisory was delivered to everyone's staterooms. Basically, the changes in routine to deal with it were as follows: (1) the buffet would now be served to you, rather than allowing you to take food yourself; (2) even in the dining rooms with waiters, they couldn't put bread on the table, or salt on the table, or sugar on the table, even in paper packets; these were handed to you by waiters on request; (3) they stopped vacuuming the rooms and the halls; (4) we were requested only to use our own bathrooms, as opposed to the public ones, as much as possible; and (5) any cases of diarrhea and vomiting were to be reported to 911 (the ship's 911, of course) and they wouldn't even charge for it (all other medical services are charged for; we had bought a cancellation policy that also includes most medical services).

The buffet thing was not well thought-out in execution. The buffets themselves are set up for people to mingle from station to station, not to get food in a straight line. As a result, you might put your salad together from five different servers. And the servers didn't speak very good English, and the servers didn't understand what you meant when you wanted "just a little cauliflower", so people were arguing and a lot of the passengers, who aren't good at social skills to begin with, were shouting.

The worst was the drinks line. They are not well-designed even for self-service. The water is separated from the ice. The coffee is separated from the cream and the sugar. Now that you had to get someone to get all these things for you, and again often someone who didn't speak good English, this turned out to create long lines, often with people holding their breakfast or lunch on a plate getting cold while trying to get a cup of coffee.

And the weird thing was, there was one server who figured it out. He realized that if he filled a large number of glasses with ice, and a large number of coffee cups with stirrers, he could save a lot of time when the rush came. He did it once. I figured someone at Princess would understand he had got it right, and make everyone do that. Instead, we never saw it again.

Everyday at about 5, Captain Jolly would get on the PA and give us an update on the spread of the norovirus. It took him four days to even say that the cooperation of the passenges was commendable. Every day he would use the same line about Princess having "the deepest sympathy for anyone struck down by this virus." And the runs/upchuck number climbed "in perfectly predictable ways". I had told Marjorie that my guess was that the restrictions would come off on the first sea day, probably right before lunch. I hit it perfectly.

So now we're back to getting our own damn food. We have bread on the table at dinner. It's a lot more relaxed about the ship.

The day was quiet, as I said. At one point, we saw a freighter out our window, but I didn't get my camera out in time. Otherwise, it looked like this:



All day. No change. Nothing. And we have six days just like it ahead, after tomorrow.

Madeira damn well better be fun!