After two months working on a cruise ship in my first contract I thought I was the toughest sailor ever. Those first two months were hard for me, I experienced rough seas every week traveling to the Bahamas and I thought I had passed the test. But then I had to go on life boat for something called “boat drill”.
The boat drill is a safety exercise to get the crew familiarized with the emergency procedure of abandoning the ship. The procedure involves a lot of activities but the short version is:
1. Getting the crew into the life boat
2. Put the life boat on the water
3. Go around for a short spin and come back
This was the first time I felt sea sick for real and on top of that, we were more than 50 persons on that boat wearing the life jacket. Hot, sea sick and confined: definitely not a good experience for this “tough sailor”.