Greggors:Spa Model & The Beginning of the end

Like any great contract it usually starts to wind down when enough of the team who are their when you start begin to leave and 4 months in as you begin to suffer burnout suddenly your best friends leave and you have to go through the effort of making new friends for a couple of months.

We had a massive cabin party for Cassie before he left which only ended when the sun came up / and some people had to go to work, to get around any potential noise complaints Cassie just invited the other people whose cabins were nearby, this was followed shortly by my 31st birthday onboard some of the carnage which you can see below, thankfully my birthday fell on a Victoria night which meant I had a Seattle recovery day.

One tangential story from Seattle turnaround day was that I inadvertently became a model - a SPA model! On turnaround days when the PAX are walking around getting aquatinted with the ship the spa offer tours of all their facilities which is essentially ‘here is the gym, here are the massage rooms and hottubs’ like all other departments the tours are designed to sign as many PAX up to the onboard classes and promotions for that cruise.

So to demonstrate the different services the spa offer they need willing crew members to ‘showcase’ on as models while the PAX look on impressed. I was always (and because I was lazy) the shave model, that meant I got my head shaved, full mens shave and facial and head, neck and shoulder massage every turnaround day for free. It was great and sometimes you could be sat in that chair being pampered for 2 hours, it also meant I always looked as good as I possibly could on the first day of the cruise.

There were only two incidents I can think off during my modelling days, the first was when they were training a new girl straight from the Steiner academy how to do the straight razor shave and she cut me to ribbons, I didn’t feel the cuts as I heard Katie say ‘right now you’ve cut him so to hide that just keep applying hot towels and that will close the wound’ after a few minutes of that and a crowd of spa girls watching you would have never known I’d been cut except for the bloody rags in the bin!

The other time was after a particularly heavy night of drinking and I had slept through right till around the time I was due to help out, I had ignored the phone and my pager in my still drunken state until Katie began banging on the door. Somehow I got into my uniform and was harried upstairs and into a chair, I was still clearly drunk because soon as the eye shield was put on the room started spinning and I had to stumble out of the chair and find a nearby waste bucket to throw up in.

As the Alaska season inched closer and closer to its grey, wet and cold end I was starting to get a little partied out and working permanent nights for months will do that to you, instead of going out and exploring the stunning nature of Alaska in the day I would sleep off the night before and if I did drag myself ashore it was usually to go to another bar / pub / restaurant. The parties came thick and fast as my 31st birthday was another crazy Victoria/Wardroom combo night, there was Cassies epic cabin party and then a lab party thrown by the new manager Richard once he took over.

At this point I was around 7 months into a 6 month contract having already done a few months on the Sapphire before my promotion which honestly now felt like another contract and I had been asked if I could do one more month to finish out the Alaska season. With my promotion only ‘acting’ at the time it would have been stupid to say no and it was going to be nice to finish the season out with the rest of the team with 4/5 of the team leaving on the last Seattle turnaround, and a new team taking over for a few months of Los Angeles, Hawaii, South Pacific cruising before this new team, manager and headed to South America and Antartica for the companies highest revenue generating itinerary.

Nicole and Chantal my two favourites from the cruise staff had left so the onboard events just didn’t have the same energy and general drunken fucking around that I’d gotten used to each cruise. Just like having to bond with new team mates in the photo department you need to get on with the new cruise staff and explain to them how you shoot the events and promote them, without making it seem like you are telling them how to do their jobs. Little did I know there was still many surprises to come on this contract.