Thursday, November 26th, At Sea

Bob:

We got up at sunrise and enjoyed the empty decks at the topmost level of the ship. After breakfast, we walked our usual circuit on the promenade deck until after 8:00, then Monika put in a load of laundry in one of the ship's self-service laundromat areas. After she rejoined me we walked a bit more, then I went down to the laundromat to transfer our wash to the dryer while Monika went belowdecks to try out the ship sales (no sale!).

Meeting up once again, we walked along the inside of the promenade deck enjoying the beautiful decorations. Near the entrance to the Princess Theater they had old drawings of costumes for plays from German fairy tales, and even some actual costumes that looked intriguing but also quite old. I wish Lois could have seen them as she could have made a much more expert judgment about them.

At the end of the morning we attended a tour of the backstage area of the Princess Theater. One young woman, who had the "dumb blond" look of Doris Day, I had pegged to be just another good-looking fill-in to the corps de ballet during the shows we had seen. But she in fact turned out to be the director/manager of the entire dance troupe and anything but dumb! Hah! Yet another stereotype blown to smithereens! We also talked to a gymnast/dancer from Ohio who had studied with a ballet instructor imported from Russia (quite unusual) and then obtained a New York stage job right out of High School (very unusual). He was happy working on the ship. Talking to a sound engineer, I found out that the sound levels were limited to 90 DB as measured by a sone meter perched on the edge of the sound mixer's booth. That explained why I could listen easily to all the major productions on the Sun Princess, which was a refreshing change from so many other cruise ships where the sound levels have been amplified into the ear-splitting range.

After lunch Monika left for the art auction while I attended the Navigation lecture. He started off with a slide detailing the steps in the training to be a ship's officer, which was interesting and then launched into the different methods used to navigate the ship. Several methods resembled things familiar from my aviation background including "shoreline navigation", which used bearings to known landmarks similar to "pilotage" in aviation, dead reckoning using time, course, speed, and drift to calculate the most probable location, and radio/satellite navigation of which the most current version is GPS. Celestial navigation using a sextant to fix the positions of planets, stars, and the moon and thereby infer an exact location was also still used on the Sun Princess but that method is laborious and time-consuming that it is not commonly used in aviation nowadays.

I was interested to learn that the Sun Princess still primarily used paper charts rather than relying on the electronic versions. I was also surprised that the engines were large diesel motors and that they used low-grade bunker oil that was de-watered, filtered, and preheated to 300-odd degrees prior to being used as fuel. That did explain why the ship's exhaust stacks smoked so much, though.

The slide show included interesting details of the other physical systems on the ship. I was surprised to learn that those underwater wings reduce the extent of rolling motion of the ship by 80%! That's huge and it beggars the imagination to think how the ship would otherwise wallow around in heavy seas. To prevent heeling due to the wind blowing on the superstructure, fresh water was shifted laterally to port or starboard ballast tanks to literally keep the ship "on an even keel".

Although the Sun Princess had both bow and stern side thrusters, the two main propulsion propellers were mounted in a fixed position under the stern with long drive shafts running out to them rather than being mounted in Azipods as I have seen on other modern cruise ships. Possibly the Sun Princess was one of the last ships built without the azipod system, but it did seem to hamper its maneuverability a bit and helped explain why the ship needed two tugboats to help extract us from the particularly narrow dock and channel at the port for Napier, New Zealand.

After the lecture I asked why the ship was registered in Hamilton, Bermuda, and the young officer said it was simply cheaper. Apparently having the required set of regular inspections carried out by Bermudan authorities was less expensive than other countries would be, but he reassured me that the number, quality, and thoroughness of the inspections was just the same as it would be for a U.S. or British registry, for example.

After we returned to our cabin we both had to face the task of packing for disembarkation, which is always a sad time. At first I worked on the my journal while Monika packed, then she worked on her journal while I packed. By playing tag-team, we managed both to make some progress updating our journals and to successfully get our main suitcases packed by dinner time as they had to be out in the hallway by then. We had one more beautiful sunset, and then went to sleep.