Brisbane to Los Angeles - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 100

occasion, I have ironed my one nice shirt and donned the ill-fitting cotton blazer I bought in Auckland dur-
ing our madcap rush to find grown-up clothes.
After inviting us to sit down and pouring some wine into Rebecca's glass, Captain Alfredo Romeo—and
truly, one could not invent a better name—tells us that he began his maritime career on cargo freighters.
After a few years, he switched over to passenger ships. It's easy to see why he'd make the change: In his
present role, he is combination rock star and monarch.
Captain Romeo enjoys remarkable job perks. (Tomorrow, for instance, once he's anchored us near a
small island in the South Pacific, he'll be taking the afternoon off to go scuba diving with the ship's resident
naturalist—a beautiful, lithe blonde woman who works for the Cousteau Society.) He eats gourmet cuisine
at every meal. His staff is obliged to treat him with deference, and the passengers beam when he deigns to
walk among us.
The ladies, especially, light up in the captain's presence. I should mention that Captain Romeo is a strik-
ing figure in his dress whites, epaulets, and captain's hat. He is a tanned, barrel-chested man, with close-
cropped hair the color of gunmetal. He also works a three-months-on, three-months-off schedule and lives
in an Italian villa when he's not commanding a ship. If Rebecca left me for him, I suppose I'd just nod and
get on with my life.
The other side of the coin: Should anything at all go wrong on this voyage, the blame falls squarely on
Captain Romeo. And so very much can go wrong. For instance, elderly passengers often fall ill. If you've
been on a cruise, you likely heard the term “Code Orange” spoken over the loudspeaker at least once. It
indicates a health crisis—such as a cholesterol-addled old man keeling over in the dining hall, streaks of
marinara sauce still dripping from his cheeks and lapels. When emergencies like these arise, the captain
must immediately decide whether to divert the ship to the nearest proper hospital facility (thereby ruining
the expensive vacations of the seven hundred other guests) or to trust the shipboard medical staff to handle
the treatment (thereby risking calamity and/or a lawsuit).
Of course, the spine-chilling, ever-present fear for any captain is that he might let his ship go down. Less
than a month before the Mariner left Auckland, a cruise liner called the MV Explorer was off the Antarctic
coast when it hit an iceberg, cracking open its hull. At three a.m., the captain issued the order to abandon
ship. Passengers spent five harrowing hours shivering in open lifeboats, making nervous Titanic jokes, be-
fore a Norwegian cruiser arrived to rescue them. Captain Romeo read news reports about the incident and
he tells us it was a minor miracle that everyone survived. Had a storm kicked up, and lifeboats toppled into
the icy Antarctic water, the outcome could have been far grimmer.
Captain Romeo's own personal nightmare seems to involve rogue cargo containers (the kind Lucian
warned us of), which can dislodge from freighters in storms and be left adrift. “They float just far enough
below the surface that you can't see them,” the captain tells us. “And they don't show up on radar.” He has
a piece of steak skewered on the end of his fork, and he waves it ominously in the air before him. I believe
the steak—which he has sliced into an approximate rectangle—is meant to represent an invisible container
lurking somewhere out there in front of us, waiting to punch a hole in our hull.
Earlier in this loop of the Pacific, while crossing the Bering Strait, the Seven Seas Mariner got caught
in a wicked storm. Down in the hold, the food supplies sloshed around. Pallets of eggs were smashed into
yellow goo. Tins of tomato sauce exploded into bloody splatter patterns. This would have posed a problem
for the ship's restaurants—had any of the passengers not been too seasick to eat.
Even when things run smoothly, captaining a cruise ship has its hassles. Half the time, you're more a
hotel director than a sailor. And you're completely divorced from the simpler pleasures of a life on the
waves.
A day after dining with the captain, I chatted with one of the ship's navigational cadets. He's a seventeen-
year-old British kid named Richard, and this assignment on the Mariner is a required internship arranged