princess

Wednesday 20th June 2007

4:32 p.m. CET Sunday night was almost entirely uneventful. Monday night wasn’t much better, although there was one group sat fairly nearby who were appreciative and were making requests, despite their increasing rowdiness as the evening drew on. For some reason, last night the sound system, which had been fine for a couple of weeks, decided that it was going to refuse to work, so I spent quite a while trying to rectify the problem, which I eventually managed to do, and the evening went fairly well after that.

The weather is excellent here in Holland today, which is more than could be said for last night; just after we had left the harbour in Hull there was a gigantic thunderstorm which made the one in Europort the other week seem like an April shower. Saw some spectacular fork-lightning over Grimsby, and it seemed the cloud was following us as the storm continued well into my third set. It did die out however, although the torrential rain continued, to the extent of flooding the ironically-named ‘Sun Deck’. It’s a shame I was playing at the time of the storm, as I would have liked to have watched it more attentively, and possibly tried getting some photos or short video footage.

Yesterday it was four weeks since I began work on the Rotterdam. The time has flown by, more so than on any of my previous contracts, which was probably helped by the fact that I have kept myself busy with one thing and another. Looking back this is definitely the best ship to work on out of the four (apart from the food, although this does now seem to be steadily improving). By the time my contract has finished, this will be the first time I will have worked every night for a whole month continuously.

11:34 p.m. BST Again quite a relaxed evening this evening. Once again I played all standards during my first (instrumental) set, which went down well, particularly with a group of friendly Spaniards who were sat behind me. My vocal sets went well too, I didn’t have many requests, but I had several people coming up making positive comments.

Just before my 10:15 set I was stood on deck as not only was there an awe-inspiring sunset, but also the Grand Princess had just left her berth in Rotterdam and was on her way out to sea, and she passed us on the channel. I managed to get a picture of her just before the batteries on my camera ran out, it’s a bit blurred but you can make it out. (That black blob to the left of her hull is a tug boat).



We caught up with her just as we were leaving the mouth of the harbour, and we went past her at close range. She really did look amazing, from what I saw (which admittedly wasn’t much), there was an oddly-shaped observation deck at the back, and there was also an open-air cinema on the roof.

I forgot to mention earlier that I had a chat with Gareth this afternoon, and he is keen for me to come back after this contract, and possibly rotate with Tim, the other pianist, who has been working on and off this ship for a while.

Thursday 21st June 2007

10:43 a.m. BST Today is the longest day!

Last night Gareth and I were looking at a map of Europort, and he pointed out a small town just up the coast to the North with a rather amusing name…