Day 9 – Monday 7 May
Another grey day. Position at 0700 ship’s time was 40deg 27.4N, 68deg 36W – roughly 100 Nm south east of Cape Cod. Rain. Wind Force 8 from NE, Full Gale. Course 084, speed 21 knots. Sea state ‘Moderate/Rough’. There was a bit of a chop on, and it was getting worse. As the day progressed, the weather escalated to Storm Force 10, with a nasty dark grey sea, white horses, and deep troughs of 4 – 5 metres This was more like the Atlantic that I had encountered before. The upper deck was closed off and spray from the pounding bow was lashing our balcony even at 10 Deck level. The ship was still coping very well, though there was some slamming and juddering as we punched through the waves. We were feeling fine, but already the motion was getting a bit wearing. Sick bags were placed tactfully in lobbies, and the older people were shuffling slowly along, hanging on to the grab rails in corridors for support.
This was a quiet day in terms of activity. We did attend a good lecture by a professor who has three degrees from Harvard. It was the first of three lectures entitled ‘Global Threats in the 21st Century’: a series about where we are politically and globally, and how we got here. The ‘we’ referred, of course, to the USA but the points could readily be read across to the Western world that includes the UK. He took us through the aftermath of WW2 and the start of the Cold War, which led to the formation of the US Department of Defense and the CIA as well as other significant changes in the organisation of US government. It was useful to recall those quite frightening times, when we used phrases like ‘better dead than Red’ and the threat was very real. He moved on through Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan, and the fall of the Iron Curtain and he left us to ponder on the US policy of – essentially – being the world’s policeman, with a moral obligation not only to keep the peace but also to impose its style of democracy. A lot of food for thought there, and Lecture 2 will be most interesting. Jane found it a bit too much like a university lecture and may give the rest a miss, but I enjoyed it.
We have just heard that the Duchess of Sussex has had her baby at last, a boy, name to be decided. That will give the Press in the USA and UK something to work itself into a frenzy over instead of Donald Trump and Brexit. Wonder if they will call him Donald?
We were processed through UK Immigration this morning – a very clever procedure in which the officers are embarked in New York and we are all ‘done’ gradually during the passage. We have come across this approach before, when we were going to Australia from Mauritius, and to the UK from Lisbon, and it is very sensible. A pity US Immigration does not do the same thing – it would save a lot of time and angst. Not often we are more efficient than the USA.
Today is Crossover Day: the day when the graph of our projected onboard allowance spend, based on a pro rate expenditure over 14 days, crossed the shallower gradient of our actual spend. In other words we can start spending a bit more freely from now on, as the allowance we were given was quite generous (pans out at $86/day on average). We celebrated with a cocktail each before lunch, Jane having a ‘As Cool as a Cucumber’ (Gin, Sour Apple Schnapps, fresh cucumber, sugar syrup, freshly squeezes lime juice) and I a Mojito. I thought a Ginger Cosmo or a Dark ‘n’ Stormy might have been more appropriate for the memsahib but, wisely, I held my tongue. Daringly, Jane bought a QM2 fridge magnet under the new free-spending regime.
Our new sailing companions are mainly Americans, as one would expect sailing from New York. It is fascinating to listen in on the conversations and to revel in the different accents and drawls. Very polite people and much more outgoing and forthright than we retiring British. And we have some famous US personalities onboard: I am certain that I heard Ethel Merman sitting behind us in the Grill, which is a surprise to me as I thought she was dead. A mixed bag in the sartorial stakes for lunch: one man turned up wearing a grubby white Tee shirt as if he had just left the washing up in the galley for a break with the passengers. I wasn’t too sure about the man with the lumberjack shirt hanging outside his jeans either. Dear oh dear, what has happened to my Princess Grill? Quite a few LGBT couples, just as there were on the way over – they have a thriving social get-together every evening in the Commodore Club at 1700. Lamb curry for lunch, very nice.
We had a long chat with our old waitress from the Australian trip, a girl from Romania. Her normal station was in Queen’s Grill, but this afternoon she was on duty for five hours at the entrance to the Kings Court canteen, dispensing hand cleanser to everyone entering. What an awful and boring job. She was not too enamoured by the clientele in Queens Grill (one click above us in Princess Grill) as she found them demanding and arrogant – something that didn’t surprise me. I think she welcomed the opportunity to break the monotony by chatting to people she knew.
We spent the afternoon relaxing after yesterday’s punishing day as the other lectures were not particularly appealing. We were going to attend the classical concert featuring a guitar player, but he had become separated from his guitar so they substituted a string trio instead. The latter would normally have been a fine replacement, but they were a bit out of tune, even to my untrained and unsophisticated ear, so we baled out of the theatre, along with several others.
Black Tie evening and the welcoming cocktail party this evening, but we gave the latter a miss as the queuing and bun fight were getting a bit dreary, not to mention the difficulty in standing as we corkscrewed around. We introduced ourselves to our new dining room neighbours, he a retiree of the USAF, both heading to Kent for a holiday. He had served in the UK on loan to the RAF and they regularly visit the UK now. He had served in the USAF equivalent of the RAF Regiment, which guards airfields. Now these two were Republicans and voted for DT, more because they disliked and distrusted Clinton than for liking the man, about whom they had no illusions. It is educational to be able to take a disinterested view of other peoples’ politics and hear both points of view. As I gazed around my fellow dinner guests I was struck by how elegant and attractive the American women looked: beautifully coiffured hair, carefully applied makeup, expensive clothes. Jane, in her emerald green satin evening dress that matches her eyes looked fabulous, of course, as she always does. I did not see if Mr Grubby Tee Shirt had scrubbed up well, but the other men had made an effort and matched their wives in elegance, restoring my faith in my fellow Grill passengers. Some, including our neighbour, wore medals on their Dinner Jackets.
Day 10 – Tuesday 8 May 2019
Crikey, what a night. Storm Force 10, sea state ‘Very Rough’. We slept badly owing to the roaring of the wind outside and the ship’s motion. I dreamt that I was on a ship at sea and woke to find that that was, indeed, the case. Our position at 0745 was 41deg 22N, 58deg 17W or roughly 250 Nm south east of Nova Scotia. Course 082, speed 17 knots, 12C, overcast and rain. Thankfully, the weather moderated a little during the day and the clouds cleared, revealing a dark blue-grey sea, still swollen, but looking just a bit less angry.
En passant to the Grill for breakfast I noticed a man going into the Kings Court canteen dressed in dirty trainers, black socks, with white hairy legs, shorts and a Tee shirt, the whole ensemble topped by a straw pork pie hat. Dear oh dear oh dear – do we really want to go Britannia class in future?
I skipped lectures in the forenoon and settled myself in the Commodore Club, up for’ard under the bridge, there better to gaze at the white-flecked sea and write to you good people. Jane attended a lecture by Roger Mcguinn, previously of The Byrds, a talk entitled ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. I did not particularly want to hear about the Salvation Army, so I gave it a miss and had a cappuccino instead. Jane said afterwards that he was very good and that the talk described his varied career, which apparently was in pop music, not a quasi-military Christian charity.
The clocks were advanced at noon today, a different approach to doing it overnight and, in my opinion, better. We are now at GMT – 3, or four hours behind those of you in the UK. 2,300 Nm to go. We had great plans for the afternoon but, um, we both fell asleep after lunch missing my lecture and Jane’s seminar on choosing lipstick. Oh dear, geriatric decline already; it must be contagious. I woke up in a different world, at tea time, with a blue sky and a fairly calm sea. I tried going on the upper deck for a breath of fresh air, but the higher decks are still closed off because of the wind. We are not out of the wood yet.
Fortunately, I managed to catch up on our professor’s second lecture on ‘Global Threats in the 21st Century’ on the television. The point he was making in Lecture Two was that not only had recent US military intervention throughout the world not worked, but it had also generated resentment to the USA among Muslims and had fed the seeds of terrorist activity. He suggested that the policy of going it alone, without UN or allied support, was also unwise and non productive. Finally, he postulated that an imposed democratic solution on a failed or failing state might not necessarily be the best solution – sometimes it might be better to have a competent or ‘benevolent’ dictator; far better to create the conditions that encourage a democracy from within, than impose one from outside. It was interesting to note that Singapore is not a democracy, yet it is a successful and prosperous state, comfortable in itself. These were quite controversial thoughts – he cited as examples Gaddafi’s Libya being grudgingly better than the anarchic country that exists today (ie we should not have intervened), and the failure of democracy in Iraq after the West’s intervention. I thought he had some good points.
On the way to dinner, in the lift, we met a slightly harassed-looking couple who were between courses in their meal. They were on their way to the kennels to put their dog to bed for the night. I offer no comment.
Cocktails tonight in the Chart Room before dinner. Jane had a Cuba Libra with Appleton rum in tribute to her Caribbean roots. I could not decide what to have, so Jane suggested I have an ‘Eye of the Storm’, a bizarre concoction of madeira, Mount Gay rum, pineapple juice and passion fruit juice, served on crushed ice with an orange twist in an elephant, and drunk through a straw. It was like nothing on earth and I am only too relieved that no one else I knew was there to see it. I am not too sure how I made it to dinner, especially as I helped Jane with her rum and coke too. And so to bed.
Day 11 – Wednesday 8 May
We actually slept in a bit today…woke at 0500 and dozed until 0800, when Jane suggested we skip breakfast. We are shifting around a bit again after a steady night, though the sea looked OK. Position at 0800 ship’s time was 42deg 21N, 47deg 5W. We are roughly 350 miles SE of Newfoundland at the southern end of the Grand Banks. Wind Force 4 from N, sea Moderate, course 083, speed 22 knots. Air temperature is 4C (yes, four) and sea temperature is 3C (it did rise later). Jane is already predicting an awful summer, of plants withering in the greenhouse, seeds rotting in the ground and blossoms destroyed by wind; all her efforts wasted. She is missing her garden, bless her. Amazing how meteorologists can predict the forthcoming summer weather from the conditions in the North Atlantic.
We decided to do breakfast after all, but it was delayed so that Jane could see The Baby on Sky TV. What is is about women and babies? They all look ugly to me. Even I was no great shakes in the early days before I blossomed into the handsome frog that you see today. Tummy rumbling, and the couple appear holding a bundle of white blankets. Is that it? Can’t see a thing! Good grief. Mad dash aft and down three decks to just make breakfast at 0915. In transit, we passed a woman who responded to my cheerful ‘Good Morning’ and smile with a face that would curdle milk. Judging by her companions, who responded more conventionally and pleasantly, she was an American so I cannot blame my fellow countrymen for unfriendliness this time. Fact is, I suppose, we are all the same fundamentally: some happy, some sad, some sweet, some sour.
Our first serial of the day was a ‘Virtual Tour of the Bridge’, presented by the Captain in the Royal Court Theatre. We knew this would be very popular, so we were there at D – 30 accordingly. This was probably the best lecture of the cruise. The Captain proved to be a fluent and humorous speaker and he covered the training of officers, bridge operations, the philosophy and psychology of exercising command as well as navigation and the QM2 bridge controls. Amazingly, he started out as a British Airways pilot, but was made redundant in the 1990s and changed career to become a mariner, starting at the very bottom as a Cadet. He trained at South Tyneside College in my old home town of South Shields – the same college where my father obtained his Master’s Foreign-Going Ticket and, from the Captain’s description of the oral examination, the process did not appear to have changed in broad terms. I remember my father being tested on how to beach a ship, morse code and semaphore, but these are no longer on the curriculum. I noted also that the old colloquial term ‘Ticket’ has been replaced by ‘Licence’. Masters and ship’s officers also have to be trained as paramedics and in rudimentary surgical skills, as only ships that carry more than a certain number of passengers have to carry doctors; for the vast majority of merchant ships the Master or 1st or 2nd Mate is the doctor, performing operations (nowadays under radio guidance) on the saloon table. The Captain described how, as a Mate in a container ship, he had to perform a procedure to solve a blockage of urine in a member of the crew, without radio assistance, and using Page 59 of The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide and a large bucket. This chimed with many of my father’s salty stories – he was a dab hand with the sailcloth needle and the skills read across nicely to suturing. I will not go into the technical detail of the bridge controls and propulsion, as I covered that in an earlier blog after my ‘behind the scenes’ tour, but the concept of Command Resource Management (CRM) will be familiar to at least two of my readership. Navigation is by GPS using, primarily, US Department of Defense satellites, but with Russian defence satellites as a back up, and the old fashioned navigation as a final backup, as either (or both) GPS could be turned off in time of tension. There are two Officers of the Watch (OOW) at any one time, one senior officer and one Third Officer, working a 1in 3 watch system on traditional nautical 4-hour watches (First, 2000 – midnight; Middle, Midnight – 0400; Morning, 0400 – 0800; Forenoon, 0800 – 1200; Afternoon 1200 – 1600; Dogwatches, 1600 – 1800 – 2000). It seems that, in Cunard, the Dogwatches are taken as one 4-hour watch, rather than the traditional two 2-hour watches that give watch-keepers a different watch each day. So it looks like the unfortunate OOWs who have the Middle get stuck with it every night. I remember those heady days, or rather nights, and am delighted now to promptly forget them again. Overall, a really good talk, and fascinating.
The clocks were advanced again at eight bells in the Forenoon Watch (noon – do keep up), so we are now at GMT – 2, or three hours behind those of you in the UK.
After lunch we finally managed to get outside. The wind had dropped, the temperature had risen to ‘bearable’ and we took a good stroll around the higher decks, 12 and above. We even managed to walk round The Lookout, above the bridge on 14 Deck, where we had first seen the Statue of Liberty in the rain. It was comparatively benign now (though we still wore coats) and the whole area was virtually deserted as most people seem to prefer 7 Deck, the Promenade Deck. In passing, I noticed people exercising their dogs in the cordoned-off area outside the kennels, aft on 12 Deck, and was horrified to see that the white teak deck was soiled by dog mess. No one, it seemed, had the gumption to pick up their own dog’s mess and presumably they expected the crew to do it. Yuk, and what a waste of a good teak deck.
Jane was going to attend a seminar on powdering her nose or some such similar procedure but, in the end, decided to read a book instead. That is the nice thing about being on holiday – the world is our oyster.
Early supper tonight so that we can watch the film, First Man, about Neil Armstrong. Then more cocktails to help solve that underspend. As I write it is 1710 ship’s time, so I will send this off now, as has become my convention.
Archie Harrison – I ask you…
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 