Here comes the Sun!

From a few months ago not wanting to come back and suffering from severe burnout, an email from Amanda telling me how awesome the Sun was and that I’d also be doing a world cruise made my mind up pretty quickly that I was coming back for another contract.

I had spent about 8 weeks at home since the Coral and got my contract through stating I’d been promoted to a junior videographer level 2 which meant about another $200 a month, this also sucked as I’d been told by head office at the time that I’d get bumped to a senior role after doing well on the Coral. As I soon learned the office would say pretty much anything to get someone onboard a ship that was short in a department.

After two of the longest flights I’d taken at this point, London to Hong Kong, HK to Sydney I’d been awake for about 2 full days at this point and wondered what awaited me onboard. This contract my senior was a guy called Travis from Canada who’d been doing this a few years already, he was fairly quiet early on but everything seemed organised much better and more professional than the Coral and I'd be working with Travis for a few months up to the start of the world cruise.

When the Sun Princess was built in 1995 it was the biggest ship in the world at the time, now in 2008 it was a little worse for wear but instantly it felt like working for a different company onboard. The ship was so relaxed and chilled compared to the rule heavy way the Coral was run, our photo manager Mick was one of the most respected photo managers in the fleet and wherever he went his teams made money. It was like night and day between the two different ships and that even extended to the passengers onboard, where on the Coral it was mainly Americans with a smattering of UK onboard, the Sun was almost all Aussies with a smattering of Asians onboard.

Still to this day the Aussies are my favourite guests, I think the English and Aussie humour is fairly similar and they are much less demanding onboard. If for example with an American passenger you told them what time to come to the photo gallery to pick up their pictures and there was a technical problem which meant a delay, you can guarantee that guest would complain and then expect to get the pictures for free. If that happened with an Aussie we’d get a simple ‘no worries, we’ll check back later' or a ...

With the Americans you always had to be ‘on’ in regards to what you said and the companies service motto at the time ‘we don’t say no’, with the Aussies it was more relaxed and you could have a genuine laugh with them. Once one of the photogs Danni who was new onboard was struggling with the till (and probably after a few drinks myself) and I turned to the passenger and joked ‘don’t worry she's probably just drunk’, the passenger laughed his head off and Danni looked mortified as she’d also came from a ship that was a little bit stricter than the Sun

The roommate situation was good as well as I was sharing with another English guy from Kent, Matt who had a guitar so I instantly knew we’d get on as he also introduced me to Flight of the Conchords New Zealands 3rd most popular folk comedy duo.

The sun was slightly smaller than the Coral and most of the photo teams cabins were mixed in with the entertainment department and shops at deck 4 mid ship in a crew only area which also meant no sneaking around through PAX areas like on the Coral which definitely minimised the chances of getting in trouble. As the sun was one of the companies oldest ships at the point, it also led to the occasional flooding of the crew cabins on deck 4 but not from sea water just leaking old pipes, though I don’t believe anyone who doesn’t shit themselves a little bit the first time they walk into their cabin and see water sloshing everywhere!

Thankfully I was not on deck 4 as there was one photo cabin on deck 5 at the front of the ship, which was mixed in with the ships dancers and musicians so it was nice to be able to socialise outside of your department. It also took a little while to get used to walking through the corridor and seeing everyone half naked on a regular basis, like most things on ships you just get used to it!

As the layout of the Sun was different to the Coral, my cabin was deck 5 forward while our video room was deck 14 aft at the back of the onboard Spa, meaning we had to walk the whole length of the ship if we ever needed to go to the video room, another bonus to that was that once the Spa was closed in the evenings you could sneak up to the office out of uniform in you own clothes to edit. Another excuse would be to change into your gym clothes to edit in and then if anyone tried to say ‘why are you not in uniform’ ‘oh I'm just going to the gym’..I went to ‘the gym’ almost every day!

I soon became mates with Daryl the Aussie fitness guy who was also on his first contract as I soon found that our video room by proxy became a spa break room or a place they all wanted to hide and generally slack off! I believe the technical term was ‘wofting’ (waste of fucking time!)

One of my favourite Daryl stories was early one morning when I was getting the kit ready for a shoot, he barrelled into our office grabbed our bin, puked it and then rushed back out to finish his spin class that he was in the middle of teaching to the guests, it had been a heavy night!

As much as I enjoyed the Coral, seeing how much fun and relaxed a ship like the Sun was it barely felt like work. With the longer cruises, typically 18 - 21 days there was much more down time for us onboard which involved 2 things, the gym and the bar!

Yes, sweet Jesus was the sun a good party ship! The crew bar was a dingy smoke filled sweat box, but it was great and people would be lining up to get their first orders in when the bar opened at 6pm every night.

Each cruise there would be a crew club poster put up in the bar, emailed to those of us who had ship email accounts. The crew club was run by the crew club president, usually a crew member with a bit more time on their hands (it was a paid role) and they were in charge of organising the evenings entertainment for the crew each night.

On a typical first night of the cruise it was ‘quiet’ night, as every cruise some crew members leave and get replaced which means the last night of every cruise is almost always a big party night if someone you know or are friends with is leaving. However everyone still goes to the bar the first night to check out ‘the fresh meat’ as it was called, and to see what new crew members had joined the ship that day!

Whatever ship you work on there is always Filipino mafia karaoke night at least once a cruise and it is amazing and terrible to witness all at the same time. Firstly, almost all Filipinos can sing pretty well and they actually spend time practicing during the week so that once karaoke night rolls around they are ready! That means the rest of us barely get a look in unless we are sufficiently drunk enough to get up and perform. Despite their great voices mafia karaoke night is always the same, soft rock ballads from the 1980’s! Yes, its seems music has not moved on from that time period in the Philippines and all you will hear is the same soft rock ballads, night after night, week after week, month after month!

There are various other activities onboad that I’ll mention in later chapters but the one night the bar is the busiest is always ‘Disco night’. This would be the most packed night in the crew bar every cruise and it would usually be a theme party, these would range from simple colours black and white, school disco etc, to uniform swap parties. Disco nights were not really my scene and they involved terrible music (generally eastern European techno) and dancing, but the most of the ship would be there so you went and it was like an endurance test to get through and then you would be rewarded with the cabin parties afterwards.

After my initial few weeks on the Sun I couldn’t believe how different it was already from my experience on the Coral, the relaxed atmosphere permeated the ship and the strictness of the Coral was gone, here you saw the crew really enjoying themselves and with our cabins not being stuck in the middle of a passenger area there were many more cabin parties and with more sea days between ports there was much more recovery time between busy periods.

On the next cruise diaries - More tales from the early days on the Sun