March 14 - Catching up in the Sulu Sea

I’m perpetually playing catch up.  There are too many fun things to do on the ship and I can’t resist them.  Since my last report we stopped on March 12 at the island of Sulawesi at a port called Parepare.  It was the first day of Ramadan there (the island is predominantly Muslim) so everything was closed.  It was also incredibly hot, sunny and humid so I made an executive decision to stay on the ship.  Two friends who did venture ashore came back within 20 minutes and said I didn’t miss anything.

Now we’re in the midst of our second sea day since leaving Sulawesi and Indonesia behind, and we’re sailing in one of those many seas I’ve never heard of before.  Yesterday we crossed the Equator and we had the traditional ceremony for crossing the line.  People who have never sailed across the Equator are called “Pollywogs” and they must be granted King Neptune’s permission to cross the line and become “Shellbacks.”  The ceremony includes kissing a very large fish, being slathered with foam dyed with food coloring, and jumping in the pool afterwards.  Yesterday’s ceremony also included some spaghetti with tomato sauce being dumped on some folks.  I know it sounds corny and maybe a little juvenile, but it really is a lot of fun and we’ve all gone through it.  Neptune has a queen, a court of mermaids and some fearsome pirates to help him round up the pollywogs.  For obvious reasons the pool was closed for the rest of the afternoon while it was emptied and cleaned out.

The fish to be kissed

The things to be smeared on Pollywogs

Neptune's mermaids

Neptune and his queen

      Some of the Pollywogs being smeared and jumping in to turn into Shellbacks

I don’t often tell about my dinner hosts, but last night’s deserves mention.  I dined with our Staff Captain, second in command of the ship, who is a woman.  She’s the first woman to achieve that position in Seabourn.  In fact, there are not too many female captains at all in the cruise industry.  Captain Kate is a woman from Poland who has a 9-year-old daughter so she’s pretty young.  She was an interesting dinner companion who gave us a lot of insight into what it has taken to get to her position.  For example, at the time she began studying at the maritime academy women were not permitted to take the class in navigation which makes absolutely no sense.  Evidently the rules were changed before she graduated.

She also told us some interesting things about some of our last few days.  When we arrived in Dili, Timor-Leste, a diver was hired to go down and check one of our stabilizers.  We had apparently snagged something on it in the open sea before we entered the harbor.  The diver unsnagged it and it was found to be a small buoy loaded with drugs (the illicit kind).  Turns out this area is known for having drug drop-off points where smugglers pick up the small craft or sometimes buoys with drugs attached.  Yesterday we were traveling through the Makassar Strait, which is often frequented by pirates. The captain accordingly increased the open deck security patrols and put out water cannons just in case we were approached.  We’re traveling through an interesting part of the world full of things that I never think about at home.