There’s nothing quite like a coast guard drill in the wet, murky chill of an East Coast September.
We were expecting Canadian Coast Guard to come aboard of course, in fact we thought they weren’t coming until the afternoon so we were quite grateful that they arrived in the morning. Y’see, they don’t grant crew shore leave until after the drill is over, and none of us were really looking forward to being stuck onboard all day.
That said, with the way the weather turned out? Most of us stayed on board voluntarily.
Freya but it’s messy out there.
This morning we all stood shivering with our life-jackets on, hands thrust into sleeves and deep into pockets, all of us wishing we’d remembered to grab that heavier coat. And suddenly one of our boat team looked over the railing and turned to us.
We’re so going down.
It took a second for this to really compute in our heads, as the first reaction is “er, no this is a general drill”, but then we all followed his gaze over the railing, and realized the meant that we were stationed on the ‘sea’ side of the ship (the other side being the side where the gangway is), meaning that – since there was no way Coast Guard wasn’t going to want to see how the boats operated in the water – our lifeboat was going to be lowered.
You really think so?
I know so…
Oi vay…we’re gonna freeze!
Once you actually get down to water level and can lower the flaps over the window openings, the lifeboats actually become very sheltered but when you first get in? Man it’s cold.
But actually, I kinda like zooming around in a lifeboat. You feel like a little waterbug! And the lifeboat I’m stationed at is one of the rescue boats, so it’s really just tiny, it only holds 50 people (44 PAX , 6 crew), as opposed to the 150 the other boats can hold. Hanging there in its davits it looks kind of like a little bathtub toy.
The only thing is, when you come to the point where you’re being hooked back up to the davits again to be hoisted out of the water? And the driver is maneuvering the boat into position for that operation to take place, suddenly the “mother” ship looks awfully big. All you see is this massive, painted, water-stained wall, impenetrable and…intimidating. And…as we found out…very easy to ram into. Not that our little tiny boat did any damage to the ship, nor did the ship do any damage to us (lifeboats are really built to take a beating!) but still it was an impressive shudder that went through us!
And no…I was not driving!