A Tender Approach – At Sea – [04/05/2017]

It’s a wonderland out here. And sometimes the wonderland presents us with challenges. No matter how hard we try, there will always be things that we simply can’t make the guests understand. One of the biggest of those things? Is that we cannot control mother nature.

Seriously, She never answers Her deck phone, and do you know what the roaming charges are on a call like that? We can’t afford to stay on the line very long after all!

This is said with only a minor amount of self-depreciating sarcasm.

Getting us into a port of call is the domain of the bridge, and of course the Captain, but on the decks below the navigation team the rest of us are in charge of trying to tell the passengers precisely why the tendering operations are not necessarily going the way they expected. There is so much at play when we lower those little motorboats into the sea and send them shuttling back and forth to shore. It’s not that we want to cause inconvenience or trouble, we truly are running as fast as we can, but so much of it is out of our control! I am very lucky, my new position takes me away from the pressure of the tender table, but I remember it all too well, and because we are so short-staffed just at the moment, I will actually be going back to that table voluntarily just to relieve some of the pressure. The tender port the day before yesterday did…not go well. In fact, crew was denied shore leave at all because the backlog was so severe. Needless to say no one was pleased about that.

Despite the fact that we granted everyone free drinks in every bar onboard for over an hour today, we’re all somewhat on pins and needles about tomorrow, when we’re supposed to go to Fanning Island. In my almost 7 years with the company I don’t recall getting successfully into Fanning Island even once…it’s very remote, and there’s not a lot there to begin with. But it’s because it’s remote the guests want to be able to say they’ve been there…

So, this…is going to be interesting.