Those of you who have cruised before are probably familiar with the process of tendering (and those of you who don’t cruise have heard me talk about it enough). Basically when a port either has too small a harbor, or doesn’t have a deep water dock – the ship anchors a distance off and sends the passengers ashore in little tender boats that hold 60 or so people each comfortably. Now, considering there are 1800 pax on my current ship you can imagine that this requires some kind of crowd control system in order to keep things from going insane.
Enter the concept of “tender tickets”. Everyone gets a number, and only when your number is called can you proceed to the tender dock.
This is what happens every week in Sitka. Normally it runs quite smoothly, but somehow this morning something went wrong. When tendering goes wrong, it goes ugly. When tendering goes off the rails, it leads to those of us on the frontlines having a very *very* hard morning (because obviously, it must be our fault!)
Without going into the depressing details, let me just say how glad I am to be ashore even if it is raining – with hot chocolate and time to actually relax…shore-leave may not a right, but it certainly is a blessing.
All in all it’s been a roller-coaster of a week: lost hard-drives, broken computers, 1am phone calls, ….one thing about this life, it’s certainly never boring.