St Kitts

I woke this morning to a view of St Kitts, but also to some worrying news. We anchored in the early hours, in a safe location, but it seems the anchor has dragged, and put the ship in a rather unsafe position. Someone should have realized sooner, but as luck would have it, the bridge crew were having a little nap after anchoring, leaving no one on watch. It’s a fragrant breach of our regulations, and I shall warn them not to do it again.

I gave orders for the anchor to be lifted, and for the vessel to use power to move back to safety. Then if we hadn’t had enough stress, the Chief Engineer asked me to come and look at the anchor. To my horror, a large segment was missing. And it was clear that it had fractured just where we had seen the cracks back in port. So much for the reassurance that the cracks were cosmetic. Once in position, we put down the second anchor, which thankfully seemed to be in perfect condition.

All this activity delayed our passengers from getting ashore, which was a little bit of a PR disaster. St Kitts was meant to be the highlight of the cruise, and we’d regularly been showing videos of the island, to get sales of our full-day tours. Rather than an early start for them, we only started moving passengers ashore in the late morning, and had to compress our tours to be completed before dark. Needless to say, despite none of this being the fault of me or my crew, many passengers complained, and were demanding a partial refund of the tour cost. It’s company policy to avoid unnecessary payments, and more than my job is worth to start dishing out refunds. So by the evening the atmosphere on the ship was really unpleasant. Still, I’m used to this sort of thing, and anyway, it will all have simmered down by the morning.

The ship was under way again, for our next stop, Guadeloupe, and I was ready to go to bed, when I had a visit from the ship’s doctor. He had twenty more cases of the mysterious sickness, and had done a little investigating, looking for a pattern that might explain the cause. And he had found something interesting. The majority of the cases were people who had been stuck on the ship that first day at Antigua. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why that should be, but I knew straight away. To dampen the complaining, I’d authorized unlimited provision of free rum cocktails, and the passengers had made the most of it. The doctor jumped up, and said he would do some sort of test, and would be back shortly. Well, an hour later, he came back. He’d analyzed a sample of the rum, and found significant traces of the chemicals used in hand sanitizer.

That left me in a quandary. Should we tell the passengers or not? I decided that such information could only cause distress, so decided against it. It was now past midnight, so I got the chief steward out of bed, and along with a couple of his men, we carried the remaining rum barrels to a side door on the hull, and emptied them out. Then we punched a few holes in the barrels and threw them out. I was furious of course with the purser, who had bought the rum from his cousin’s factory, albeit at a very reasonable price. When we return, I’ve told him to get our money refunded, or we’ll send a sample to the Gamalia Health Ministry. Not that I’d actually got a sample, or that the Ministry would care anyway!