February 2012

The captain and DL on the bridge of the Orion.

We are on the final leg of our cruise. Tomorrow morning when we wake up, we’ll be in Hobart where we’ll disembark and I, for one, will spend another week seeing a bit more of Tasmania. So this afternoon I went up to the bridge to say hello to the captain, Andrey Domanin. He wasn’t the most gregarious guy in the world. Maybe because he was miffed I’d turned down an offer to eat with him in favor of dining with the whisky maker, Bill Lark, and the Bruny Island pig farmer, Ross O’Meara. Or maybe ship captains are just naturally taciturn.  I don’t know. As I said, this is only the second cruise I’ve ever been on and the first where I’ve actually met the captain.

Just making small talk, I asked Captain Domanin where he was from (his English accent is very thick) and he told me the Ukraine. Which I found interesting. He didn’t really expand on that (as I said, he doesn’t talk much) so, just to keep things lively, I said, “Well, if you were a Ukrainian sea captain fifty years ago, what sort of a ship do you think you’d be on? A submarine?”

He didn’t like that question. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“I’m just saying that if it was 1961 instead of 2011, I don’t think you’d be the captain of a cruise ship sailing around Tasmania, would you?”

Well, that set him off. Why not? he said. Even in 1961 Russians captained all kinds of ships. Why would it have been so unlikely for him to captain a cruise ship in Tasmania?

Seeing that I’d sort of stuck my foot in my mouth (although I still can’t imagine that a Ukrainian would have been in charge of a cruise ship in Australia fifty years ago), I decided to change the subject. I told him that I’d had a wonderful time at sea and it gave me a greater appreciation for how grand it must have been back in the Golden Age of steamship travel when a ship like the Titanic cruised across the Atlantic and it was such a grand event.

Captain Domanin fixed me with his steely blue eyes and in a hushed voice said, “It is very bad luck to mention the Titanic when you are at sea.”

Oh. Okay. My bad.

With two big strikes again me, I decided to cut my losses. I shook his hand and told him I really had to be going. He nodded without smiling. Just one last thing and then I’ll get out of your hair, I told him. “Would you mind having your picture taken with me?”

“You want to take my photo?”

“If you don’t mind.”

He sighed, I handed the camera to one of the other officers, and he quickly clicked off six or seven photos. This one was the last one. And the only one in which Captain Domanin smiled. I think because I had just said, “I think we’re done here.”

And we were.

Lobke and the wait staff singing La Bamba. It was painful.

Last night was the Orion crew show. Which was sort of like an early American Idol tryout. Without any talent. It’s hard to say what was more painful, watching the male housekeeping crew put on coconut bras and line dance or listening to the ship’s bosun (short for boatswain; the deck crew foreman) sing not just one but two Tom Jones numbers (who knew Filipinos were so crazy for Tom Jones?).

Actually, no. Listening to bad Tom Jones (is there good Tom Jones?) was not the low-point of the evening. That would have to be when my pal Lobke Verburg, the tall, stately South African maitre d’, came out holding a Corona and wearing a sombrero to join several of the wait staff in singing La Bamba.

Ay-yi-yi.