Of all the unexpected things that can happen on a voyage, almost the worst as far as impact on the guests is a cancelled call. The stripes do not cancel a call lightly, for one thing it’s likely massive of behind-the-scenes red tape, and honestly no one wants to see a port missed, it does no one any good.
The only time we’ll cancel a call is if it is unsafe to make it. In the case of this cruise we’ve had to do that twice: once for Easter Island (which is notoriously difficult to get into in the first place) and once again today for Georgetown. In both cases this was because the swell was simply too dangerous to risk running a proper tender operation. The one tender that did get launched successfully spent 45 minutes slamming up against the jetty on the other side with absolutely no chance of being secured so that people could actually debark from it. After nearly an hour of attempting every way possible to avoid having to do so, the Captain came over the PA system with the regrettable announcement that we would in fact be moving on and today would be transformed into a sea day.
It’s difficult to explain what goes on behind the scenes when a call gets cancelled. There are a lot of phone calls involved. People who originally were scheduled to have a shore-day have to be called and informed that they are due in at work as soon as possible (sometimes this involves waking people up which is never any fun), there are multiple announcements involved as the schedule shifts back into sea-day activities. People have to be slotted in to cover things that weren’t originally on the schedule at all, and everyone’s day from the stripes down has to be rearranged. The office becomes a din of ringing phones and shuffling paper until everything eventually settles down.
So today turned into an unexpected sea day. It could have been worse I suppose, I did need the extra time to get some more work done on my cataloguing. The biggest section is nearly finished (literally one shelf left), and after that it should go along smoothly. The rest of the sections just need a count and not much else.