A cabin with a view &'The American':The first days of the Star Princess

I joined the Star Princess in San Francisco already three months into a contract so at the halfway point I was starting again, only this time as acting senior videographer! The Star's regular turnaround port was LA but I had joined a few days earlier so I could do a handover with the outgoing senior Bevan a Kiwi guy who had just broke all the company records cruising in Antartica some months before on the Star, ironically this was the ship my first senior on the Sapphire Rich had been transhipped from to the Sapphire and here a few months later I was on his ship as a senior.

The first few days of a handover are glorious as no one onboard knows who you are and you can get away with breaking a lot of the usual rules, like using PAX facilties at any time, going to the buffet whenever you want and crucially wearing your own clothes with just your cruise pin. This was a great con as this was what the bosses from head office did so if you wore your own clothes (but no name badge) for a few days but with a cruise pin then most people thought you were head office and didn't say anything!

Coupled with the blagging was getting either an officers cabin or a passenger cabin for the few days of handover, I got an officers cabin down on the M1 right in the middle of the ship which was conveniently close to the video room that was also in a crew area. This was also a bonus as it meant if I wanted to do any early/late work I didn't have to be in uniform.

I think it was Bevan who met me in the terminal and introduced to the South African management mafia we had onboard, Cass was our manager with JP & Lara as the two assistants, the rest of the team were from Poland, Chile, New Zealand, Canada, America, Austraila, England & the Phillipines.

Immeditately I got a super laid back vibe from the management which was great, everyone seemed to know their jobs and better still the team really seemed to get on together, though many of the team had only just arrived in the last few cruises as traditionally the team is assmebled for a season, in this case the upcoming Alaskan one. Another bonus was my roommate from my first contract Liam (centre of above picture) was also onboard and the quickest way to get the lay of the land on a new ship is to have someone you've worked with and get on well with onboard already.

Also I was stunned to find out that the Star had two bars onboard, a regular crew bar at the front of the ship but also an officers ward room at the back of the ship. On most ships the officers ward room is for officers only and you can only get in their via invatation which usually means its just a private bar for the officers to hit on spa girls and dancers. However the Stars wardy was much bigger than most other ships (only the Grand and Dawn had similar arrangements at the time) and all staff were allowed to go to the wardroom as well. Know I could get bogged down in the politics of unfair crew seperation and how elitist the whole thing was, but if you wanted a quietiesh drink in the early evening served in an acutal glass with comfortable seats and a jukebox then the wardy was it.

Most crew bar nights after 11pm involve trying to yell at people over really bad techno and although the wardy was also frantic sometimes you could actually hold a converation in there.

As an acting senior I would also be in charge of a junior videographer and remebering my very recent brushes with good and bad seniors I was determined to be fair and get a good rapport going with my junior. 'So whats he like?' I asked Bevan 'well hes a good enough videographer, but hes very American as you'll see' he deadpanned in a tradtional Kiwi delivery.

*For legal purposes I will refer to the American as 'Chad' a fake name as you'll understand why after a few more blogs*

Later that afternoon Chad came into the video room after his excursion and introduced himself to me 'whats up man, I'm Chad and I'm here to party and hook up with chicks!' I just looked at Bevan and then back to Chad and thought 'was that a joke?', as the guy was bigger than me, was definitely going bald, had gold chains around his neck and some terrible mid 2000's facial hair. I thought it must be a joke so I said 'We'll its going to be a long six months then right mate?' and he just stared at me blankly. I remembered that many Americans cannot detect sarcasm 'What you mean man, chicks dig man' he replied, 'cool' I laughed and looked other at Bevan who just nodded at us both.

As I'd seen from the few handovers I'd been involved in as a junior the first thing the seniors do is go to the bar at 6pm and stay there 'handing over' till closing time. Yeah, its usually drinking..a lot! However Bevan said he was busy and the rest of the team said he wasn't really much for the bar scene anyway, so at 6pm I met up with Chad and some of the other photogs and the drinking commenced. My first red flag about Chad came up pretty quickly, he was perving on the dancers and said to me 'watch this' as a few pints of liquid courage had somehow emboldened him to go over to them.

'Hey so why do you hot girls hang out with these faggy guys?' he said, by way of opening line. I forget exactly who it was but she completely blanked him and walked away, I mean this was only 2009 but looking back I'm amazed there wasn't more fallout from that comment, he'd have been lucky to keep his job if he'd said something like that today. It had only just gone 8pm and yet Chad was shitfaced already, and making less and less sense as the evening wore on. I suppose a big deal wasn't made about it because only a few people heard it in a busy bar and Chad already had a reputation.

As I later learned Chad only had his job at Princess bceause his Dad was a highup exceutive chef right near the top of the Carninval Corporation, that put his Dad several levels above any of our direct bosses, nepotism at its best!

Trying to put Chad's drunken incident behind me (as I'd be stuck working with the guy for at least 3 months) we initally got on as we had a similar taste in music which meant we could blare out heavy rock while we were burning the last days DVD's. Bevan had shown me some of his Antartic footage and while impressive, I think at the time it seems bizaare to say that going there really didn't appeal to me and I don't think he appreciated my joke that Antartica was just 'freezing your arse off outside everyday filming bits of ice float past'. Also each year the Antartic run had made the most money anywhere in the fleet so there would be a ton of pressure on management to make sure they would not be the first ship to fuck it up.

I was brought up to speed on email protocals and dealing with other departments onboard like entertainment (whose events we filmed) and shore excurions (who provided our free excursion tickets) I also had an offical @ship email address which although really only for official use it meant I could email family from my office without having to pay for an extortionate crappy connection internet card.

We had one more 7 day Mexico roundtrip planned with a tunraround in LA before we started our reposition to Alaska, handover had gone fine and Bevan was due to get off in a few days and then I'd be holding the reigns for the first time with a junior with questionable behaviour at best, but I was excited and even though I wouldn't be able to film in Alaska this time round I knew what the popular tours were and had already sorted out a shooting schedule for JP. It was fairly simple as he'd film in the 3 ports of call and I'd shoot all onboard events those 3 days, we'd double shoot Tracy Arm which was our day of glacier park cruising and rotate the editor each week and divvy up the other events equally, rinse and repeat for 3 months till I finished my 6th months. Everything was looking good for a great contract on the Star until the rumours about Swine flu began to circulate.

On the next cruise diary - The Swine Flu Cruise