Lifeboat Drill and Bridge Tour

This morning we had one of our monthly lifeboat drills.  At 9am, the ships alarms go off, with seven short blasts and one long.  We then have to put on our life jackets and go to our muster stations.  Before we can get there we have to make sure we have on appropriate clothing, which includes long pants, closed toe shoes, long sleeves, and a hat.  My muster station, or where we meet to get on the lifeboats, is on the fifth deck in the dining room.  We line up with women at the front and men at the back, and after roll call we are taken out onto the deck by a lifeboat.  During our drill today, the captain came on and announced Code Blue and said it was not a drill.  It was so hot in the long clothes that two people had passed out.  Because of this, we did not even finish our lifeboat drill.  These drills can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.

At the bridge tour yesterday, we were shown where the ships main controls are.  We saw GPS systems, satellite phones, light controls, fire door controls, water door controls, electric charts, and more.  The steering wheel you see in the movies - the big wooden one - is not what they use anymore.  The steering wheel was small and plastic.  There were also all of these books with rules in them, and plenty of flags.  Some of the flags were there to be courteous to the country that we are in.  Other flags were there as ship status symbols.  They go from Alpha to Zulu.  Alpha means someone is overboard; Hotel means there are pirates on board.  In the case of pirates, the ship will start all four engines, moving us at about 28 knots.  Normally the ship uses 2 engines, for a maximum speed of 20 knots, but because we have to have time for class the typical speed is 10 - 15 knots.  A ship engine has over 9000 horsepower!  The policy for pirates is to just try to run away.  There was one year on another ship where pirates were climbing up ropes onto a ship, and the crew had to use fire hoses to blow them off.