Galley Rave

It's tough to keep crew morale up. Working seven days a week, nothing but service, little free time, and constant slavery to the details of boat life all tend to keep fuses short and nerves frazzled. To make matters worse the ship ran out of water last night. Well, "ran out" in this case actually meant that we had only 900 gallons out of 8,000 gallons left. Apparently on the Safari Explorer 900 gallons left is equivalent to empty for whatever mystical mechanical reasons. So the bridge crew and chief engineer got up early to make a B-line for Petersburg and dockside water. There was enough of a trickle coming out to boil potatoes for BBQ lunch (best done early), make oatmeal and Glacier Bay Porridge, but dishes had to wait. Though I don't see a lot of what goes on down in the galley, I'm sure plenty of tempers flared at the whole debacle, especially based on the crew meeting we had later that day.

I ran some errands in Petersburg; bought fish, toothpaste, ordered menu paper, picked up an invoice for Shelly from Viking Travel, and most importantly, procured some party favors for the crew rave we were planning. As fate would have it, the Rexall Drug Store had a whole bunch of Dora the Explorer party hats, napkins, paper plates, treat bags, and a Diego and Boots centerpiece - all half price. So Dora the Explorer has become the Safari Explorer's unofficial mascot. She's been living on top of the burn kit in the galley. About the size of a baby, with a permanent watermelon smile and kickin hair locks, she's brought good juju to the ship, and lo and behold she helped turn a slap-dash crew rave into a themed event. So how perfect is that?

The passengers were celebrating the 11th birthday of one of the kids, even setting up a poker night, and Shelly spent all afternoon making a stunningly perfect and beautiful birthday cake. With green, blue, and pink frosting, she sculpted three chocolate cake rounds into three perfect poker chips with a big stylized "11" on the top. With 11 sparkler candles on top it was a truly impressive sight. Meanwhile, Ang carried the prep work for the day as usual, giving me time to finish consolidating and updating my i-Pod, after which I was able to create a 3.6 hour Galley Rave playlist - all hip-hop, mostly from Angie's i-Pod. The BBQ buffet didn't get broken down until 3:30 pm since all the male passengers came back late from their morning fishing charter. We've got the little Halibut the boys caught downstairs on ice, and since I spent all of my free time preparing for the Galley Rave, I still have no idea how I'm going to prepare it for them (probably smoke it and serve it with some kind of rice - saffron? - for lunch). Even though it's now midnight, and I'm typing instead of sleeping, I'm going to have to get up at 5:30 in the morning just to make sure I'm not in the weeds all day long.

After dinner was served (Ribs are the kid's favorite and some huge Alaskan Weathervane Scallops I picked up in Petersburg) and clean-up was mostly done, Galley Rave preperations began in earnest. Shelly assembled the Diego Centerpiece and then began blowing up balloon/bubble things (a little kit I bought that is basically a tube of rubber cement with tubes for blowing through). We got dolled up (hopefully I'll get some photos on this blog - wireless willing). Chilled the non-alcoholic beers, and put pizzas in the oven. Can't get delivery, so we settled for DeGiorno. At this point, I couldn't stand waiting any longer, so the Galley Rave Mix began bumping at loud volumes. Trash bags went up over the lights we couldn't turn out. Darkness was important because of the other key element of a galley rave; all three of the boats I've worked on have emergency strobe lights of some kind. So I gathered three of the floating, self-activating strobes attached to the life-rings. They're designed to turn on any time the unit is pointing floaty end up any more than horizontal. Once the lights were killed, we hung the strobes from the ceiling, got out the leftover silly string from the birthday party, and waited by the door to spray each crew member coming down to the party. Once they were provided a Dora or Diego party hat, they were offered near-beer and pizza and thus the party began. Until Gabe came down I was the only boy crew member there, trying to keep the party live by dancing around all the wall flowers. Everyone had a great time and thus our goal was accomplished. And what a mess. But Ang, Shelly, Lisa, and I cleaned up everything and finished up dishes.

As we were finishing up, I made my way up to the ledo deck for a smoke (a must with non-alcoholic beer) and was greeted by a handful of humpback whales swimming around the boat. I could tell they had caught the rave vibe by their proximity and the frequency of their festive sounding blow-hole blowings. Clearly we're blessed and blessing the waters we rest in.

Good night.