Prepping for a world cruise

A world cruise is a hallowed position to be in onboard a cruise ship and not many are lucky enough to do one especially when your only a two person department on each ship. I'd made a good enough impression on management on my first contract and as I'd learn you need a decent junior you can count on when your the senior.

The whole appeal of a world cruise is that you will visit a different port everytime you go ashore and this is a rarity as many crusie lines will do the same 7 day / 12 day itinerary with the same ports of call for 6 months. So if you decided to work on a cruise ship to see the world you might be unlucky enough to end up on a 7 day Carribean hell run where you will only see the same 3 ports of call on the same day each week.

For us videog's it was the holy grail, a different new place to film everyday and we'd get to see more than any other crew member when we departed from Sydney for a 75 Transpacific World Cruise. Other than the ports for the photo department a WC is a licence to print money and Mick had been killing it as the manager before the WC started. Part of the reason for that was as well as the team being awesome cruising itself was still relatively new in Australia and I think event the cheapest cabins were going for $15,000 per person on the WC.

This meant that the passengers were loaded with money and would pretty much buy anything onboard, so we would not have to worry about hitting our sales targets on DVD's as almost everyone onboard would want to buy a complete world cruise set.

The downside for me was that Travis was not going to be there for the WC and he would be replaced by a Kiwi videog called Adam who at the time was one of the most senior videogs in the fleet. The problem is it takes you a little while to get used to working with another videog as you each have your own way of working, but this was also the first time I got to witness a senior videog handover as that never happened on the Coral.

A handover basically involves the outgoing and incoming senior checking every serial number for every piece of kit in the videoroom and then counting all the stock like blank DVD's and cases. And although each ship generally had the same old Mac Pro tower with Final Cut Studio 3 each ship would be set up slightly differently and at the time there was no overall head office guide to how the systems should be set up.

As a senior you need to co-ordinate with head office over how much stock of blank DVD's and cases you'll need as you will not have a regular turnaround port to pick up supplies during a WC so if your stock does not turn up on time you are royally screwed.

So handover should be 3 days of equipment checks but in reality it was more like 3 days of drinking and partying, the outgoing senior can relax and finally see the light at the end of the long 6 month tunnel while the incoming senior still hasn't offically taken over and also theres suddenly 3 people to do 2 peoples jobs.

Many other departments had a similar staggered change with half the teams changing which led to a new cruise director coming onboard for just the WC, though the plan was to swap out the cast halfway through the world cruise so not all my friends would be leaving at the sametime.

Without getting the order exactly right over the course of the next 75 days when we left Sydney, Australia we'd be heading to Apia, Samoa, Auckland, New Zealand, Bora Bora, Busan, South Korea, Dravuni Island, Fiji, Glacier Bay, Juneau, Ketchikan & Skagway in Alaska, Hawaii, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Langkawi, Malaysia, Nha Trang, Vietnam, Pago Pago, American Samoa, Papeete, French Polynesia, San Francisco, Phuket, Thailand, Penang, Malaysia, Petropavlosk, Russia, Shianoukville, Cambodia, Singapore, Tokyo & Nagasaki, Japan, Vancouver & Victoria, Canada before finishing right back where we started in Sydney.

On the next cruise diaries - more crew life tales from onboard the Sun Princess