Day 27 - January 22

Turn day. Turn day’s are when one group of guests leaves in the morning and we get the whole boat ‘turned’ (cleaned, scrubbed, ready) for the next round of guests who will get on a few short hours later in the afternoon. Turn days are long days and I used to abhor them with tears and tiredness. I’m still not particularly fond of them but I’ve accepted that my work takes me as long as it does and now I get a kick out of the adrenaline rush.

This was a fifteen hour turn day- which happens often for me but today it was all of us stews. I woke up feeling groggy from this cold, my ears and throat hurting. I asked Daisey if when she was sick it was her ears and throat. She said it wasn’t and so I suddenly became worried. She suggested I talk to the Dr. He told me it was a cold and I was relieved to hear it.

So during this crazy, working, hectic day with a nightmarish moment of opening the stack (where we keep the clean linens) which I thought was to be my job to clean up, found it packed quite literally to the brim. My senior stew, Kathy Miller, wanted to organize it today though. Thank heavens for that. Instead I got to be bossy, which I’m really good at, and play senior stew at dinner. It was kind of fun.

But the highlight moment of this, day 27 in a thirty day countdown, was the huge coconut that my dear roommate Daisey brought to me from La Paz. I stuck a straw in it in between dressed and ready and inro’s. I was so thirsty from cabin cleaning and the cool coconut water was soothing on my sore throat. Mmmmmm. Thank you Daisey.

Oh! And we got good coffee today too which is also a happy thing. Seattle’s Best baby! And Henry’s blend! Which made me think of my Mama. J Who I will get to see soon. Yay!

Thirty Day Countdown

Thirty day countdown

One month until my six month contract is over!

30~ January 19

Today we saw bottlenose dolphins. It has been a while since we’ve seen dolphins and we’re glad for the visit. As I’m cleaning cabins I stop and lean over the railing on the 200 level. The water is so clear that I can see their sleek bodies deep under the water and tell when they’re going to surface.

Watching them today is different than usual. It has a slower quality. There aren’t as many of them and they’re swimming slowly, softly, smoothly and in the same direction. Often we are in the midst of a dolphin party where they swim every which way and jump out of the water like crazy people, It’s fun and amazing to see but I really enjoy this moment of the boat and dolphins moving slowly slowly beside one another. It is lulling and I take it in happily.

Day 29 - January 20

More dolphins today and this time the partying kind. They were going wild and there were grown ups & babies. I sat up on the lido deck, the topmost deck which is where we store zodiacs and kayaks. It’s crew access only and moments like these, when we have this all around view and no guests about, make us very glad for this perk. With me is our chief mate Lucy, senior deckhand Ian (who told us about the view from the lido), deckhand Amelia, bosun Carter (Jordan’s older brother), and senior stew Kathy Miller who no matter how many times she sees a dolphin or whale will never cease to freak out delightedly and yell. It is fantastic to watch dolphins with Kathy Miller. “Shut. Up! Stop it! Just stop being so cute! I just wanna HOLD you.” Watching dolphins with Kathy Miller is just a whole other experience.

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Tonight was beach barbeque and even though I’m feeling a little down with this cold coming on Jackie persuaded me to go to the fire after we were done with chores. Jackie and I have both been in the nap trap of late and the combinations of her being the one to push me off the boat, her leaving soon, and wanting to make the most of my last month here, I decided to go. We packed up the smores stuff and a few of us went over. Surprisingly there were still guests over there. They usually clear out by the time we get back. It was good to see them lingering by the fire though. Someone mentioned smores as in “wouldn’t now be a good time for some”. Ian poked me and looked at me with meaningful arched eyebrows which I took to mean “We have smores stuff, won’t they be glad to know.” I was incorrect in my translation though and after I made the announcement to the group Ian explained that he meant “Smores is our secret”. He said he’ll be more specific with his eyebrow language next time.

When most guests had gone Jackie brought out her guitar and sang for us. I love to listen to Jackie sing. She sang us a lullaby about the sea written for her nephews first birthday. The fire was warm, the waves lapped against the beach of Puerto Gato with it’s strange red rocks that I like so much. The moon was full but often hiding behind night clouds. Jordan and I talked in an old familiar way that was nice. It was a good evening and worth staying up for.

*You can find Jackie’s music on Itunes. I would love to see her get a big boost of purchases on her songs this month if everyone who reads this would go and download one from I-tunes. I think it’s a whole dollar and it would bless her. Go to Itunes and look for Jackie Daum.

Day 28 - January 21

Today this cold caught up with me more. I was so tired so all I did today was work and sleep and mostly work. I’d like to go hang out upstairs, unwind a little, but I needs me some sleep so I write this from my top bunk after taking some Nyquil and hoping to feel better tomorrow. I have a day off after turn day that I am so looking forward to. I feel like something more interesting than this certainly happened today but I’m afraid it isn’t coming to my mind. So goodnight.

December 20

My senior steward and I fondly call working here the boat bi-polar. Within an hours time, or maybe 10 minutes, you can easily find yourself from one emotional extreme to another. This was particularly true for me the first few weeks of my contract (oh hey! Two months left as of yesterday by the by!). This is certainly the hardest job that I’ve ever had. (Right now I’m writing this rather objectively and during an ‘up & up’ portion of ‘boat bi-polar’ so don‘t worry. J ) I have in one moment been amazed to be kayaking among seastars and jellies in remote places of Alaska and another having a meltdown while cleaning a cabin, throwing pillows and heave crying saying to myself “You do not do this! You don’t lose it like this! This is not professional!” A picture which now makes me laugh out loud. I can be freaking out on a turn day* trying to soft scrub 1 of 7 heads* that are part of cabins which need to be fully turned around from guests that got off that morning for guests who are getting on at 5:00. And I can be laughing in a snorkel mask with disbelief that I get to be paid to be in Baja California. Boat bi-polar.

*turnday- the day one group of guests disembarks in the morning and a whole new boat load of guests comes on in the afternoon.

*head- bathroom

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Today is my brother Samuel’s 12^th birthday. Happy Birthday Sam! I love that kiddo and miss him muchly and I hope that his day, and coming year are remarkably good.

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Happy Christmas week! I love Christmas and even though I’m not home (can’t think about it!) I’m excited that it’s Christmas. I love this time and I’ve been reading through advent devotions that are very good. Last night my friend and fellow steward, Edd, read with me and we also read through the prayers and such for the day in his prayer book. It was such a good thing and my heart was very glad. Tonight Jackie and I worked on harmonizing a couple of Christmas carols and we’re going to try and get the boys to sing with us for Christmas day. Thanks to the lovely Miss Leah our crew lounge is decorated with a string of Christmas lights, sprig of mistletoe and even a felt snowman “Let It Snow” sign. I don’t really see that happening though; J Here we call Pelican Poo on the rocks our “snow”. Strangely it looks just like it. We’ll have a ‘blue’ Christmas with the beautiful Baja water. Daisey and I are going to bake cookies on Christmas eve and we’ve all drawn names for exchanging gifts. Plus I have a brown paper package from home sitting in my closet.

“It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.”

Smile. I’ve had this line from ‘The Grinch’ going round in my head.

And now I shall go and take a short late night nap before the lunar eclipse at midnight thirty. G’night.

　

Santa Catalina Day Off

I woke up at 7:30 today so I could catch a zodiac for a hike and snorkeling at Santa Catalina on my first Baja day off. After gathering snorkel gear and a quick bite of chicken tortilla scrambled eggs and blueberry oat pancakes left for the island and joined a hike one of our naturalists, Sharon, was leading. Sharon speculated that the island had gotten some of the recent hurricane activity because the barrel cactus were doing beautifully and she could feel some moisture in the air. This is the only part of the world where you can find barrel cactus which are very tall and multi limbed. Which incidentally is not a term the naturalists used.

The area here is uninhabited and yet the trail we took was nearly perfect because it was an ‘arryo’, a dry river bed. Santa Catalina is the only home of the rattle-less rattlesnake. We didn’t see any of these but we did see hummingbirds, mockingbirds, ravens, woodpeckers, and even a Christmas cardinal. As for plants there were many barrel cactus as well as the aptly named Japanese lantern plant, indigo, night blooming jasmine and other things which I don’t remember the names of. Oh! We saw desert mistletoe.

If you were to walk alone here, which I can do next time, you would be able to experience a quiet unlike you can find anywhere I’ve been before. You’d have chattering birds but that’s about it.

Coming back from the hike, it is a very different thing to go from desert Wil-E Coyote/Roadrunner terrain to the lapping of waves against a beach of smooth granite rocks.

We took the zodiac from here back to the SeaBird only to board almost immediately again to go out snorkeling. And there I swallowed quite a bit of salt water, got a saline wash for my eyeballs, and saw some beautiful sea life with Daisey and Tom. I pestered a pufferfish (to no avail), surveyed a starfish (blue), hovered over some urchins (yeah, there goes the alliteration.), was enamored by the little blue neon fish, and stung by a jelly for the first time.

After lunch and a nap I could tell we must have sighted something because the boat had slowed down. Sure enough I could hear strange eerie shrill shrieking from my cabin and then Jackie’s footsteps coming down the focsle stairs to verbosely announce “Dolphins. Hundreds.” We ran upstairs and watched with the rest of the boat as these hundreds of playful water mammals jumped around in the water, sometimes following to boat, sometimes jumping full body lengths out of the air.

It was a good day off.

Bonanza Beach Swim. Without the Beach.

Several of us spent the better part of yesterday horizontal as we hit some seasick creating waves. It's really the first day like that we've had for positioning and it was the last of about seven so that's good. After laying in bed pretty much all day I felt the boat finally get still around 5. I began getting up to clean one of my rooms or something productive but Ryan knocked on the cabin door as I was getting my uniform together to say that we were going swimming.

Change of plans then. :)

And so we did. A bunch of us got our swimsuits on, but a piece of carpet down on the 200 level deck and dove off into the beautiful teal blue sea under a crescent of a moon. It was scary to think that something bigger or at least fiercer than our boat could very easily be beneath or around us but it didn't stop us. The salt water felt so so good and it wasn't cold like I'd expected it to be.

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Today we're in La Paz. It is beautiful and sunshiny and we got ice cream from a shop with a polka dot painted tree. There are pelicans on the water and sometimes when friggit birds fly over, silhouetted over the desert skyline it looks like some kind of prehistoric landscape.

Thanks to Miss Jackie Daum for the picture. Left to right; Kendra (chief mate), Amelia (deckhand), Jackie (steward. Also roomie and musician.), Ryan (steward), Alexis (third mate), Edd (steward), Me, Tom (deckhand)

A Good Day

Yesterday I walked out the cabin door to see fellow crew members rushing upstairs. Dolphins. They weren't bow riding, weren't actually even very close, but I did see two or three of them and more importantly the ushering out to the deck let me see that all around us was the big beautiful blue sea, that it was calm, and that it wasn't cold out. All of these were a welcome relief after two weeks of dusty grimy shipyard.

I got to work outside nearly all day. I sanded chairs getting them ready to be varnished. It was good to work with my hands and see progress as the day went on. I got to see the daylight change. Oh and we even saw a whale spout!

At midday Ryder (one of the deckhands) stopped me from sanding to point out that in every direction you could see nothing but sea and sky. No other boats. No mountains. Nothing but blue on blue. That night as dusk fell the stars came out crystal clear in the dark night sky. Beautiful. I leaned backward off the side of the ship so that the sky became the bowl beneath me and the water a canopy above my head. There was the smallest sliver of dusk light right at the horizon to show the difference between the two.

Just for a clear picture of what is going on on the boat right now- we've finished shipyard and are positioning south to Baja California (Mexico). It is a seven day positioning trip. For such a trip we don't have any guests on board and the ship is secured. ie; drawers and cupboards are taped up, windows are bolted which means on the dining room/cabin floors we have an eternal dusk. On the last two positioning trips I was on it was extremely rocky and we are a little boat and most of us were sea sick and not a whole lot got done. This trip is calm and even the most sensitive to motion are bustling about working long hours to get ship shape for the upcoming guest trips.

We are in day ... actually I lose track of time on this boat and especially during positioning so I don't know what day we're on but we get to La Paz on December 9.

Thanks for reading!

Tight spaces

Sometimes decaf coffee drinkers luck out. Example- here I am at Starbucks an hour before closing and since most people like hi rev coffee (this week so do I during the day. Still only little bits.) they don't even have it brewed which means for the same price I get an americano. The same used to be true at my favourite coffeeshop in Indiana. And I have to say I am enjoying the well marketed comfort here. (For more on feelings of that nature this week read two blogs down. ;) )



Today I was down in the laz (lazarette/engine room). I worked hard and felt like I was five. It's rather tight and labryinthy down there. Unlike the bilges there is plenty of light but strangely I felt more claustrophobic in the laz than I did in the bilges. Claustrophobic is incorrect- claustro-frustrated is far more apt. But before we go into that how about a little bit of translation as to what on the boat I'm talking about anyway?



So as I have mentioned we are currently in Shipyard which means they've hauled the SeaBird out of the water and she's raised up like a car at the mechanics. Only on a much larger scale. Before this we had to take a whole bunch of stuff out of her to get her ready for her 'spa treatment' as the bar tender, Patricia, put it. So right now our boat has no water- this time I mean running water- but we do have electricity. It's like camping except you work all day instead of hike or swim, and you don't always see the sky or sun or trees. And you have steak for dinner. And we don't sleep in tents. Okay so it's not actually much like camping but sometimes we think so. Our galley is temporarily moved to a blue tarp and the crew is living at the Days Inn, which by the way I'm thoroughly enjoying.



After the boat came up from the water we dutifully went about covering EVERYTHING inside her because of the huge mess we were about to make. Out came the garbage bags, the carpet masking (oh carpet masking. I will be perfectly fine if I never see carpet masking ever again.), the blue tape, the huge sheets of heavy duty plastic until the inside of our boat looked like an energetic 8 year olds imagination playground. With hard hats. On the outside the Shipyard workers began necessary maintenance on the SeaBird. I wasn't part of this so I'm not entirely sure what it entailed but I know there were sparks, blow torches and paint.



On to the bilges. So the bilges are as far under the boat as you can get and as far as I can understand without having actually asked the water system is in it. So we climb under the crew quarter floors to get into these small dark compartments called bilges and there we chip off bad spots and rust, grind them down where necessary, clean up and then paint. I say 'we' but until today I really only did this once. People walk around in white tyvex coverall suits and look either like astronauts, scientists from E.T. or Oompa Loompahs in Willy Wonka's television room. They come out of the bilges and look like miners. Sometimes we don't recognise our own because their appearance quite changes during the day's work.



As for myself- Jackie and I have been doing a lot of odd jobs. I've done some of the Engine Room organizing for Perry - not much organizing. Mostly moving things to their new containers and relabeling. But apparently useful so that's good. We have both done a LOT of carpet masking. Some of the carpet is being redone and so carpets we had masked had to be remasked- poor Jackie got stuck with most of that which is semi-hilarious because she abhorred carpet masking from the first day and I worked with her. Jackie's nickname is 'sailor mouth' and some of the things she said while we were trying to work with this obnoxiously difficult material made me laugh out loud. (Jackie is a musician and my roommate.)



Today I got put in the Laz to work with most everyone else. Now the Laz is also under everything but it's where most of what we unloaded and what I've been organizing goes and it's where most of the mechanics and everything else of the boat are maintained. There is technically a lot more space than in the bilges and yet I felt like a five year old today because I kept nearly having temper tantrum nervous breakdowns down there. I wasn't afraid of the closeness but I was incredibly frustrated by it. Do you know that feeling when you're a little kid and you can't make something simple work- you get caught in a piece of clothing and can't get it fixed right and you become so so frustrated by it? That is how I felt. I knew it shouldn't be a big deal but I kept bumping my head and I couldn't reach places I needed to clean and my spray bottle didn't work and I bashed my thumb. It makes me laugh to think about it all now but wow I HATED the Laz. hahaha!



But when I would come up into the blue sky and sun to breathe fresh air (oh yes, we also walk around with goggles and respirators. When we aren't wearing hardhats that is. :) ) and walk a little grumpy into the dining room I was cheered by the sight of this bright red poinsettia that one of the carpeting guys bought for us. He was grateful for being part of our -really yummy and nice - Thanksgiving dinner and so brought the flower for us. It makes me so happy.



Hmmmm. As I type this a lady comes to sit near the plug because the scooter she needs to get around wants recharging. She tells me that it came with a bad battery and so it works very slowly and they've been waiting a very long time for the new battery to come. As she tells me this I think that that must be truly frustrating. She sits down next to me, her husband across from her on a laptop working on his book. Her name is Fran and we have rather a nice chat in the twenty minutes before Starbucks closes.

And now it's time for bed. Good night.